Related papers: Experiments in Fast, Autonomous, GPS-Denied Quadro…
One of the most challenging tasks for a flying robot is to autonomously navigate between target locations quickly and reliably while avoiding obstacles in its path, and with little to no a-priori knowledge of the operating environment. This…
Quadrotors are agile. Unlike most other machines, they can traverse extremely complex environments at high speeds. To date, only expert human pilots have been able to fully exploit their capabilities. Autonomous operation with on-board…
In practical applications, autonomous quadrotors are still facing significant challenges, such as the detection and avoidance of very small and even dynamic obstacles (e.g., tree branches, power lines). In this paper, we propose a compact,…
This paper presents a reinforcement learning-based quadrotor navigation method that leverages efficient differentiable simulation, novel loss functions, and privileged information to navigate around large obstacles. Prior learning-based…
Rotor failures in quadrotors may result in high-speed rotation and vibration due to rotor imbalance, which introduces significant challenges for autonomous flight in unknown environments. The mainstream approaches against rotor failures…
Obstacle avoidance for unmanned aerial vehicles like quadrotors is a popular research topic. Most existing research focuses only on static environments, and obstacle avoidance in environments with multiple dynamic obstacles remains…
Recent advances in trajectory replanning have enabled quadrotor to navigate autonomously in unknown environments. However, high-speed navigation still remains a significant challenge. Given very limited time, existing methods have no strong…
Quadrotors hold significant promise for several applications such as agriculture, search and rescue, and infrastructure inspection. Achieving autonomous operation requires systems to navigate safely through complex and unfamiliar…
This paper introduces a safety filter to ensure collision avoidance for multirotor aerial robots. The proposed formalism leverages a single Composite Control Barrier Function from all position constraints acting on a third-order nonlinear…
Search and rescue environments exhibit challenging 3D geometry (e.g., confined spaces, rubble, and breakdown), which necessitates agile and maneuverable aerial robotic systems. Because these systems are size, weight, and power (SWaP)…
The role of a motion planner is pivotal in quadrotor applications, yet existing methods often struggle to adapt to complex environments, limiting their ability to achieve fast, safe, and robust flight. In this letter, we introduce a…
We demonstrate the capabilities of an attention-based end-to-end approach for high-speed vision-based quadrotor obstacle avoidance in dense, cluttered environments, with comparison to various state-of-the-art learning architectures.…
Visual navigation algorithms for quadrotors often exhibit a large variation in performance when transferred across different vehicle platforms and scene geometries, which increases the cost and risk of field deployment. To support…
We address one of the main challenges towards autonomous quadrotor flight in complex environments, which is flight through narrow gaps. While previous works relied on off-board localization systems or on accurate prior knowledge of the gap…
Autonomous landing on a moving platform presents unique challenges for multirotor vehicles, including the need to accurately localize the platform, fast trajectory planning, and precise/robust control. Previous works studied this problem…
In this paper, we introduce a complete system for autonomous flight of quadrotors in dynamic environments with onboard sensing. Extended from existing work, we develop an occlusion-aware dynamic perception method based on depth images,…
Recently, there have been numerous advances in the development of biologically inspired lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). While autonomous navigation is fairly straight-forward for large UAVs as expensive sensors and monitoring…
Although quadrotors, and aerial robots in general, are inherently active agents, their perceptual capabilities in literature so far have been mostly passive in nature. Researchers and practitioners today use traditional computer vision…
Over the last decade, the use of autonomous drone systems for surveying, search and rescue, or last-mile delivery has increased exponentially. With the rise of these applications comes the need for highly robust, safety-critical algorithms…
We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous…