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An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations…
This paper describes an approach to building a cost-effective and research grade visual-inertial odometry aided vertical taking-off and landing (VTOL) platform. We utilize an off-the-shelf visual-inertial sensor, an onboard computer, and a…
Autonomous nano-drones (~10 cm in diameter), thanks to their ultra-low power TinyML-based brains, are capable of coping with real-world environments. However, due to their simplified sensors and compute units, they are still far from the…
Limited power and computational resources, absence of high-end sensor equipment and GPS-denied environments are challenges faced by autonomous micro areal vehicles (MAVs). We address these challenges in the context of autonomous navigation…
The rapid deployment of drones poses significant challenges for airspace management, security, and surveillance. Current detection and classification technologies, including cameras, LiDAR, and conventional radar systems, often struggle to…
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…
A unique approach for the mid-air autonomous aerial interception of non-cooperating UAV by a flying robot equipped with a net is presented in this paper. A novel interception guidance method dubbed EPN is proposed, designed to catch agile…
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…
Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are increasingly being used for complex or hazardous tasks in enclosed and cluttered environments such as surveillance or search and rescue. With this comes the necessity for sensors that can operate in poor…
For drones, as safety-critical systems, there is an increasing need for onboard detect & avoid (DAA) technology i) to see, sense or detect conflicting traffic or imminent non-cooperative threats due to their high mobility with multiple…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…
The forthcoming era of massive drone delivery deployment in urban environments raises a need to develop reliable control and monitoring systems. While active solutions, i.e., wireless sharing of a real-time location between air traffic…
Miniaturized cyber-physical systems (CPSes) powered by tiny machine learning (TinyML), such as nano-drones, are becoming an increasingly attractive technology. Their small form factor (i.e., ~10cm diameter) ensures vast applicability,…
We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of MiFly, a self-localization system for autonomous drones that works across indoor and outdoor environments, including low-visibility, dark, and GPS-denied settings. MiFly performs 6DoF…
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…
Detecting small drones, often indistinguishable from birds, is crucial for modern surveillance. This work introduces a drone detection methodology built upon the medium-sized YOLOv11 object detection model. To enhance its performance on…
This paper proposes a novel framework for autonomous drone navigation through a cluttered environment. Control policies are learnt in a low-level environment during training and are applied to a complex environment during inference. The…
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,…
Drones are increasingly used in fields like industry, medicine, research, disaster relief, defense, and security. Technical challenges, such as navigation in GPS-denied environments, hinder further adoption. Research in visual odometry is…
Ensuring safe and efficient operation of collaborative robots in human environments is challenging, especially in dynamic settings where both obstacle motion and tasks change over time. Current robot controllers typically assume full…