Related papers: Deep Drone Acrobatics

Precise aggressive maneuvers with lightweight onboard sensors remains a key bottleneck in fully exploiting the maneuverability of drones. Such maneuvers are critical for expanding the systems' accessible area by navigating through narrow…

Quadrotors are highly nonlinear dynamical systems that require carefully tuned controllers to be pushed to their physical limits. Recently, learning-based control policies have been proposed for quadrotors, as they would potentially allow…

We present our latest research in learning deep sensorimotor policies for agile, vision-based quadrotor flight. We show methodologies for the successful transfer of such policies from simulation to the real world. In addition, we discuss…

Quadrotors have demonstrated remarkable versatility, yet their full aerobatic potential remains largely untapped due to inherent underactuation and the complexity of aggressive maneuvers. Traditional approaches, separating trajectory…

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…

Agile flights of autonomous quadrotors in cluttered environments require constrained motion planning and control subject to translational and rotational dynamics. Traditional model-based methods typically demand complicated design and heavy…

Learning to control robots without requiring engineered models has been a long-term goal, promising diverse and novel applications. Yet, reinforcement learning has only achieved limited impact on real-time robot control due to its high…

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…

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…

Landing a quadrotor on an inclined surface is a challenging maneuver. The final state of any inclined landing trajectory is not an equilibrium, which precludes the use of most conventional control methods. We propose a deep reinforcement…

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…

Drones have gained popularity in a wide range of field ranging from aerial photography, aerial mapping, and investigation of electric power lines. Every drone that we know today is carrying out some kind of control algorithm at the low…

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…

This study explores modeling and control for quadrotor acrobatics, focusing on executing flip maneuvers. Flips are an elegant way to deliver sensor probes into no-fly or hazardous zones, like volcanic vents. Successful flips require…

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…

In this paper, we present a method to control a quadrotor with a neural network trained using reinforcement learning techniques. With reinforcement learning, a common network can be trained to directly map state to actuator command making…

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…

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,…

Humans are remarkably data-efficient when adapting to new unseen conditions, like driving a new car. In contrast, modern robotic control systems, like neural network policies trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL), are highly specialized…

Quadrotor drones equipped with high quality cameras have rapidely raised as novel, cheap and stable devices for filmmakers. While professional drone pilots can create aesthetically pleasing videos in short time, the smooth -- and…