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The miniaturisation of sensors and processors, the advancements in connected edge intelligence, and the exponential interest in Artificial Intelligence are boosting the affirmation of autonomous nano-size drones in the Internet of Robotic…
Nano-drones, with their small, lightweight design, are ideal for confined-space rescue missions and inherently safe for human interaction. However, their limited payload restricts the critical sensing needed for ego-velocity estimation and…
Obstacle avoidance is a key feature for safe Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. While solutions have been proposed for static obstacle avoidance, systems enabling avoidance of dynamic objects, such as drones, are hard to implement…
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…
Autonomous nano-drones, powered by vision-based tiny machine learning (TinyML) models, are a novel technology gaining momentum thanks to their broad applicability and pushing scientific advancement on resource-limited embedded systems.…
Nano-drones, distinguished by their agility, minimal weight, and cost-effectiveness, are particularly well-suited for exploration in confined, cluttered and narrow spaces. Recognizing transparent, highly reflective or absorbing materials,…
Fully-autonomous miniaturized robots (e.g., drones), with artificial intelligence (AI) based visual navigation capabilities are extremely challenging drivers of Internet-of-Things edge intelligence capabilities. Visual navigation based on…
Nano-size unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) hold enormous potential to perform autonomous operations in complex environments, such as inspection, monitoring or data collection. Moreover, their small size allows safe operation close to humans…
Relative drone-to-drone localization is a fundamental building block for any swarm operations. We address this task in the context of miniaturized nano-drones, i.e., 10cm in diameter, which show an ever-growing interest due to novel use…
Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size limits conventional sensing-especially with poor-lighting, smoke, dust or reflective obstacles. Inspired…
While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in several missions, their inability of reliable and consistent autonomous landing poses a major setback for deploying such systems truly autonomously. In this paper we present…
Nano-quadcopters are versatile platforms attracting the interest of both academia and industry. Their tiny form factor, i.e., $\,$10 cm diameter, makes them particularly useful in narrow scenarios and harmless in human proximity. However,…
We introduce a benchmark for system identification based on 75k real-world samples from the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless nano-quadrotor, a sub-50g aerial vehicle widely adopted in robotics research. The platform presents a challenging testbed…
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…
Miniature Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) are very suitable for flying in indoor environments, but autonomous navigation is challenging due to their strict hardware limitations. This paper presents a highly efficient computer vision algorithm…
Deploying tiny computer vision Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on-board nano-sized drones is key for achieving autonomy, but is complicated by the extremely tight constraints of their computational platforms (approximately 10 MiB memory, 1 W…
Drones operating in complex environments face a significant threat from thin obstacles, such as steel wires and kite strings at the submillimeter level, which are notoriously difficult for conventional sensors like RGB cameras, LiDAR, and…
Obstacle avoidance for small unmanned aircraft is vital for the safety of future urban air mobility (UAM) and Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). There are many techniques for real-time robust drone guidance, but many…
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…
We present fully autonomous source seeking onboard a highly constrained nano quadcopter, by contributing application-specific system and observation feature design to enable inference of a deep-RL policy onboard a nano quadcopter. Our…