Related papers: Deep Drone Acrobatics
We tackle the problem of minimum-time flight for a quadrotor through a sequence of waypoints in the presence of obstacles while exploiting the full quadrotor dynamics. Early works relied on simplified dynamics or polynomial trajectory…
Aerial manipulation requires force-aware capabilities to enable safe and effective grasping and physical interaction. Previous works often rely on heavy, expensive force sensors unsuitable for typical quadrotor platforms, or perform…
Autonomous drone racing (ADR) systems have recently achieved champion-level performance, yet remain highly specific to drone racing. While end-to-end vision-based methods promise broader applicability, no system to date simultaneously…
A flight trajectory defines how exactly a quadrocopter moves in the three-dimensional space from one position to another. Automatic flight trajectory planning faces challenges such as high computational effort and a lack of precision.…
Attitude control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a difficult control problem in part due to uncertain nonlinear dynamics, actuator constraints, and coupled longitudinal and lateral motions. Current state-of-the-art…
An inherent fragility of quadrotor systems stems from model inaccuracies and external disturbances. These factors hinder performance and compromise the stability of the system, making precise control challenging. Existing model-based…
Agile quadrotor flight pushes the limits of control, actuation, and onboard perception. While time-optimal trajectory planning has been extensively studied, existing approaches typically neglect the tight coupling between vehicle dynamics,…
MAVs have great potential to assist humans in complex tasks, with applications ranging from logistics to emergency response. Their agility makes them ideal for operations in complex and dynamic environments. However, achieving precise…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall…
Automatic optimization of robotic behavior has been the long-standing goal of Evolutionary Robotics. Allowing the problem at hand to be solved by automation often leads to novel approaches and new insights. A common problem encountered with…
High-speed aerial grasping presents significant challenges due to the high demands on precise, responsive flight control and coordinated gripper manipulation. In this work, we propose Swooper, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based…
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…
In this paper, we study a long-term planning scenario that is based on drone racing competitions held in real life. We conducted this experiment on a framework created for "Game of Drones: Drone Racing Competition" at NeurIPS 2019. The…
Existing FPV object tracking methods heavily rely on handcrafted modular pipelines, which incur high onboard computation and cumulative errors. While learning-based approaches have mitigated computational delays, most still generate only…
Payload grasping and transportation with quadcopters is an active research area that has rapidly developed over the last decade. To grasp a payload without human interaction, most state-of-the-art approaches apply robotic arms that are…
We present an imitation learning method for autonomous drone patrolling based only on raw videos. Different from previous methods, we propose to let the drone learn patrolling in the air by observing and imitating how a human navigator does…
Due to noisy actuation and external disturbances, tuning controllers for high-speed flight is very challenging. In this paper, we ask the following questions: How sensitive are controllers to tuning when tracking high-speed maneuvers? What…
Designing effective low-level robot controllers often entail platform-specific implementations that require manual heuristic parameter tuning, significant system knowledge, or long design times. With the rising number of robotic and…
Overactuated tilt-rotor platforms offer many advantages over traditional fixed-arm drones, allowing the decoupling of the applied force from the attitude of the robot. This expands their application areas to aerial interaction and…
Quadrotors are extremely agile, so much in fact, that classic first-principle-models come to their limits. Aerodynamic effects, while insignificant at low speeds, become the dominant model defect during high speeds or agile maneuvers.…