Related papers: Advanced Autonomy on a Low-Cost Educational Drone …

This work adds on to the on-going efforts to provide more autonomy to space robots. Here the concept of programming by demonstration or imitation learning is used for trajectory planning of manipulators mounted on small spacecraft. For…

This paper presents a novel autonomous drone-based smoke plume tracking system capable of navigating and tracking plumes in highly unsteady atmospheric conditions. The system integrates advanced hardware and software and a comprehensive…

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have numerous applications, but their efficient and optimal flight can be a challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to address this challenge, yet there is no standardized…

This paper presents a vision-only autonomous flight system for small UAVs operating in controlled indoor environments. The system combines semantic segmentation with monocular depth estimation to enable obstacle avoidance, scene…

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are increasingly used across diverse domains, including logistics, agriculture, surveillance, and defense. While these systems provide numerous benefits, their misuse raises safety…

This project aimed to develop an automated cinematography platform using an unmanned aerial vehicle. Quadcopters are a great platform for shooting aerial scenes but are difficult to maneuver smoothly and can require expertise to pilot. We…

This paper presents a novel approach for aerial drone autonomous navigation along predetermined paths using only visual input form an onboard camera and without reliance on a Global Positioning System (GPS). It is based on using a deep…

This paper addresses the challenge of active perception within autonomous navigation in complex, unknown environments. Revisiting the foundational principles of active perception, we introduce an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework…

Autonomous navigation in unknown complex environment is still a hard problem, especially for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with limited computation resources. In this paper, a neural network-based reactive controller is proposed for…

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,…

We present a design, model, and control for a novel jumping-flying robot that is called PogoDrone. The robot is composed of a quadrotor with a passive mechanism for jumping. The robot can continuously jump in place or fly like a normal…

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved unprecedented successes in a range of challenging problems, their applicability has been mainly limited to simulation or game domains due to the high sample complexity of the…

Image-goal navigation (ImageNav) tasks a robot with autonomously exploring an unknown environment and reaching a location that visually matches a given target image. While prior works primarily study ImageNav for ground robots, enabling…

Simulation frameworks are essential for the safe development of robotic applications. However, different components of a robotic system are often best simulated in different environments, making full integration challenging. This is…

Data driven robotics relies upon accurate real-world representations to learn useful policies. Despite our best-efforts, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer is still an unsolved problem, and we often need to allow our agents to explore online to…

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…

In this study, we propose a novel visual localization approach to accurately estimate six degrees of freedom (6-DoF) poses of the robot within the 3D LiDAR map based on visual data from an RGB camera. The 3D map is obtained utilizing an…

Autonomous exploration of unknown space is an essential component for the deployment of mobile robots in the real world. Safe navigation is crucial for all robotics applications and requires accurate and consistent maps of the robot's…

With the incremental development of robotic platforms to automate the manual processes, path planning has become a critical domain with or without the knowledge of the indoor and outdoor environment. The algorithms can be intelligent or…

With the autonomy of aerial robots advances in recent years, autonomous drone racing has drawn increasing attention. In a professional pilot competition, a skilled operator always controls the drone to agilely avoid obstacles in aggressive…