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Quadcopters have been studied for decades thanks to their maneuverability and capability of operating in a variety of circumstances. However, quadcopters suffer from dynamical nonlinearity, actuator saturation, as well as sensor noise that…
Autonomous nano-drones, powered by vision-based tiny machine learning (TinyML) models, are a novel technology gaining momentum thanks to their broad applicability and pushing scientific advancement on resource-limited embedded systems.…
Nano-UAV teams offer great agility yet face severe navigation challenges due to constrained onboard sensing, communication, and computation. Existing approaches rely on high-resolution vision or compute-intensive planners, rendering them…
Nano quadcopters are small, agile, and cheap platforms that are well suited for deployment in narrow, cluttered environments. Due to their limited payload, these vehicles are highly constrained in processing power, rendering conventional…
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…
Precise relative localization is a crucial functional block for swarm robotics. This work presents a novel autonomous end-to-end system that addresses the monocular relative localization, through deep neural networks (DNNs), of two peer…
Nano-size drones hold enormous potential to explore unknown and complex environments. Their small size makes them agile and safe for operation close to humans and allows them to navigate through narrow spaces. However, their tiny size and…
Enabling the capability of assessing risk and making risk-aware decisions is essential to applying reinforcement learning to safety-critical robots like drones. In this paper, we investigate a specific case where a nano quadcopter robot…
Safe flight in dynamic environments requires unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to make effective decisions when navigating cluttered spaces with moving obstacles. Traditional approaches often decompose decision-making into hierarchical…
The miniaturisation of sensors and processors, the advancements in connected edge intelligence, and the exponential interest in Artificial Intelligence are boosting the affirmation of autonomous nano-size drones in the Internet of Robotic…
Model-based reinforcement learning strategies are believed to exhibit more significant sample complexity than model-free strategies to control dynamical systems,such as quadcopters.This belief that Model-based strategies that involve the…
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…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has made it possible to solve complex robotics problems using neural networks as function approximators. However, the policies trained on stationary environments suffer in terms of generalization when…
Agile flight in complex environments poses significant challenges to current motion planning methods, as they often fail to fully leverage the quadrotor dynamic potential, leading to performance failures and reduced efficiency during…
Targets search and detection encompasses a variety of decision problems such as coverage, surveillance, search, observing and pursuit-evasion along with others. In this paper we develop a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)…
This paper proposes the ProxFly, a residual deep Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based controller for close proximity quadcopter flight. Specifically, we design a residual module on top of a cascaded controller (denoted as basic controller) to…
Nano quadcopters are ideal for gas source localization (GSL) as they are safe, agile and inexpensive. However, their extremely restricted sensors and computational resources make GSL a daunting challenge. In this work, we propose a novel…
A long-cherished vision of drones is to autonomously traverse through clutter to reach every corner of the world using onboard sensing and computation. In this paper, we combine onboard 3D lidar sensing and sim-to-real reinforcement…
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…
We propose a joint simulation and real-world learning framework for mapping navigation instructions and raw first-person observations to continuous control. Our model estimates the need for environment exploration, predicts the likelihood…