Related papers: The Artificial Intelligence behind the winning ent…
This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first autonomous…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This paper describes Ariel Team's autonomous racing controller for the Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) simulation race. IAC is the first multi-vehicle autonomous head-to-head competition, reaching speeds of 300 km/h along an oval track,…
Motorsport has historically driven technological innovation in the automotive industry. Autonomous racing provides a proving ground to push the limits of performance of autonomous vehicle (AV) systems. In principle, AVs could be at least as…
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.…
AI technologies, including deep learning, large-language models have gone from one breakthrough to the other. As a result, we are witnessing growing excitement in robotics at the prospect of leveraging the potential of AI to tackle some of…
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…