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Related papers: AlphaPilot: Autonomous Drone Racing

200 papers

Autonomous drone racing represents a major frontier in robotics research. It requires an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can run on board light-weight flying robots under tight resource and time constraints, while pushing the physical…

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Prithwish Jana , Debasish Jana

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Maulana Bisyir Azhari , Donghun Han , Je In You , Sungjun Park , David Hyunchul Shim

Drone technology is proliferating in many industries, including agriculture, logistics, defense, infrastructure, and environmental monitoring. Vision-based autonomy is one of its key enablers, particularly for real-world applications. This…

In this paper, we present a control system that allows a drone to fly autonomously through a series of gates marked with ArUco tags. A simple and low-cost DJI Tello EDU quad-rotor platform was used. Based on the API provided by the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Artur Cyba , Hubert Szolc , Tomasz Kryjak

Most reinforcement learning(RL)-based methods for drone racing target fixed, obstacle-free tracks, leaving the generalization to unknown, cluttered environments largely unaddressed. This challenge stems from the need to balance racing speed…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Feng Yu , Yu Hu , Yang Su , Yang Deng , Linzuo Zhang , Danping Zou

In recent years, there is a noteworthy advancement in autonomous drone racing. However, the primary focus is on attaining execution times, while scant attention is given to the challenges of dynamic environments. The high-speed nature of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Qianhao Wang , Dong Wang , Chao Xu , Alan Gao , Fei Gao

Autonomous drone racing in complex environments requires agile, high-speed flight while maintaining reliable obstacle avoidance. Differentiable-physics-based policy learning has recently demonstrated high sample efficiency and remarkable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yang Su , Feng Yu , Yu Hu , Xinze Niu , Linzuo Zhang , Fangyu Sun , Danping Zou

Quadrotors are among the most agile flying robots. Despite recent advances in learning-based control and computer vision, autonomous drones still rely on explicit state estimation. On the other hand, human pilots only rely on a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Ismail Geles , Leonard Bauersfeld , Angel Romero , Jiaxu Xing , Davide Scaramuzza

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,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Fangguo Zhao , Jiahao Mei , Jin Zhou , Yuanyi Chen , Jiming Chen , Shuo Li

First-person view drone racing has become a popular televised sport. However, very little is known about the perceptual and motor skills of professional drone racing pilots. A better understanding of these skills may inform path planning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Christian Pfeiffer , Davide Scaramuzza

Autonomous drone racing has gained attention for its potential to push the boundaries of drone navigation technologies. While much of the existing research focuses on racing in obstacle-free environments, few studies have addressed the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Yueqian Liu

In autonomous and mobile robotics, one of the main challenges is the robust on-the-fly perception of the environment, which is often unknown and dynamic, like in autonomous drone racing. In this work, we propose a novel deep neural…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-29 Huy Xuan Pham , Andriy Sarabakha , Mykola Odnoshyvkin , Erdal Kayacan

Autonomous drone racing has risen as a challenging robotic benchmark for testing the limits of learning, perception, planning, and control. Expert human pilots are able to fly a drone through a race track by mapping pixels from a single…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Angel Romero , Ashwin Shenai , Ismail Geles , Elie Aljalbout , Davide Scaramuzza

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Lorenzo Scarciglia , Antonio Paolillo , Daniele Palossi

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Zhichao Han , Zhepei Wang , Neng Pan , Yi Lin , Chao Xu , Fei Gao

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Christian Pfeiffer , Simon Wengeler , Antonio Loquercio , Davide Scaramuzza

Autonomous drone racing has attracted increasing interest as a research topic for exploring the limits of agile flight. However, existing studies primarily focus on obstacle-free racetracks, while the perception and dynamic challenges…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Fangyu Sun , Fanxing Li , Yu Hu , Linzuo Zhang , Yueqian Liu , Wenxian Yu , Danping Zou

This paper presents the OmniRace approach to controlling a racing drone with 6-degree of freedom (DoF) hand pose estimation and gesture recognition. To our knowledge, it is the first-ever technology that allows for low-level control of…

Autonomous drone racing presents a challenging control problem, requiring real-time decision-making and robust handling of nonlinear system dynamics. While iterative learning model predictive control (LMPC) offers a promising framework for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Haocheng Zhao , Niklas Schlüter , Lukas Brunke , Angela P. Schoellig