Related papers: AlphaPilot: Autonomous Drone Racing
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…
Robotics is the next frontier in the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as the real world in which robots operate represents an enormous, complex, continuous state space with inherent real-time requirements. One extreme challenge in…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Event-based vision has already revolutionized the perception task for robots by promising faster response, lower energy consumption, and lower bandwidth without introducing motion blur. In this work, a novel deep learning method based on…
Drone racing is becoming a popular e-sport all over the world, and beating the best human drone race pilots has quickly become a new major challenge for artificial intelligence and robotics. In this paper, we propose a strategy for…
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…
Autonomous drone racing is a challenging research problem at the intersection of computer vision, planning, state estimation, and control. We introduce AirSim Drone Racing Lab, a simulation framework for enabling fast prototyping of…
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…
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…
Unmanned aerial vehicles, and multi-rotors in particular, can now perform dexterous tasks in impervious environments, from infrastructure monitoring to emergency deliveries. Autonomous drone racing has emerged as an ideal benchmark to…
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.…
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…
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…
Autonomous drone racing requires the tight coupling of perception, planning, and control under extreme agility. However, recent approaches typically rely on precomputed spatial reference trajectories or explicit 6-DoF gate pose estimation,…
Autonomous drones can operate in remote and unstructured environments, enabling various real-world applications. However, the lack of effective vision-based algorithms has been a stumbling block to achieving this goal. Existing systems…