Related papers: Visual Model-predictive Localization for Computati…
Drone racing is becoming a popular sport where human pilots have to control their drones to fly at high speed through complex environments and pass a number of gates in a pre-defined sequence. In this paper, we develop an autonomous system…
Autonomous micro aerial vehicles still struggle with fast and agile maneuvers, dynamic environments, imperfect sensing, and state estimation drift. Autonomous drone racing brings these challenges to the fore. Human pilots can fly a…
This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first autonomous…
Autonomous drone racing requires powerful perception, planning, and control and has become a benchmark and test field for autonomous, agile flight. Existing work usually assumes static race tracks with known maps, which enables offline…
Autonomous drone racing demands robust real-time localization under extreme conditions: high-speed flight, aggressive maneuvers, and payload-constrained platforms that often rely on a single camera for perception. Existing visual SLAM…
Autonomous agile flight brings up fundamental challenges in robotics, such as coping with unreliable state estimation, reacting optimally to dynamically changing environments, and coupling perception and action in real time under severe…
It is often necessary for drones to complete delivery, photography, and rescue in the shortest time to increase efficiency. Many autonomous drone races provide platforms to pursue algorithms to finish races as quickly as possible for the…
In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the time-optimal trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming…
Humans race drones faster than algorithms, despite being limited to a fixed camera angle, body rate control, and response latencies in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. A better understanding of the ability of human pilots of selecting…
Drone racing is a recreational sport in which the goal is to pass through a sequence of gates in a minimum amount of time while avoiding collisions. In autonomous drone racing, one must accomplish this task by flying fully autonomously in…
Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the context of…
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…
Humans race drones faster than neural networks trained for end-to-end autonomous flight. This may be related to the ability of human pilots to select task-relevant visual information effectively. This work investigates whether neural…
In autonomous and mobile robotics, a principal challenge is resilient real-time environmental perception, particularly in situations characterized by unknown and dynamic elements, as exemplified in the context of autonomous drone racing.…
With technological advancement, drone has emerged as unmanned aerial vehicle that can be controlled by humans to fly or reach a destination. This may be autonomous as well, where the drone itself is intelligent enough to find a shortest…
In drone racing, the time-minimum trajectory is affected by the drone's capabilities, the layout of the race track, and the configurations of the gates (e.g., their shapes and sizes). However, previous studies neglect the configuration of…
The flying speed of autonomous quadrotors has increased significantly over the past 5 years, particularly in the field of autonomous drone racing. However, most research primarily focuses on the aggressive flight of a single quadrotor,…
The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League(A2RL) x Drone Champions League competition(DCL) requires teams to perform high-speed autonomous drone racing using only a single camera and a low-quality inertial measurement unit -- a minimal sensor…
Autonomous drone racing competitions are a proxy to improve unmanned aerial vehicles' perception, planning, and control skills. The recent emergence of autonomous nano-sized drone racing imposes new challenges, as their ~10cm form factor…
Palm-sized autonomous nano-drones, i.e., sub-50g in weight, recently entered the drone racing scenario, where they are tasked to avoid obstacles and navigate as fast as possible through gates. However, in contrast with their bigger…