Related papers: Synthetic Aperture Sensing for Occlusion Removal w…
Swarms of drones offer an increased sensing aperture, and having them mimic behaviors of natural swarms enhances sampling by adapting the aperture to local conditions. We demonstrate that such an approach makes detecting and tracking…
Synthetic apertures find applications in many fields, such as radar, radio telescopes, microscopy, sonar, ultrasound, LiDAR, and optical imaging. They approximate the signal of a single hypothetical wide aperture sensor with either an array…
Previous research has shown that in the presence of foliage occlusion, anomaly detection performs significantly better in integral images resulting from synthetic aperture imaging compared to applying it to conventional aerial images. In…
Drones will play an essential role in human-machine teaming in future search and rescue (SAR) missions. We present a first prototype that finds people fully autonomously in densely occluded forests. In the course of 17 field experiments…
We propose a guidance strategy to optimize real-time synthetic aperture sampling for occlusion removal with drones by pre-scanned point-cloud data. Depth information can be used to compute visibility of points on the ground for individual…
Swarms of drones are being more and more used in many practical scenarios, such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, search and rescue in hardly-accessible areas, etc.. While a single drone can be guided by a human operator, the…
This work contributes to efforts on autonomously detecting a vegetation-occluded target by airborne observers. It investigates and enhances previous work on a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) strategy for Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS)…
We show that automated person detection under occlusion conditions can be significantly improved by combining multi-perspective images before classification. Here, we employed image integration by Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS)---a…
Swarm robots have sparked remarkable developments across a range of fields. While it is necessary for various applications in swarm robots, a fast and robust coordinate initialization in vision-based drone swarms remains elusive. To this…
Fully autonomous drones have been demonstrated to find lost or injured persons under strongly occluding forest canopy. Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS), a novel synthetic aperture imaging technique, together with deep-learning-based…
Occlusion caused by vegetation is an essential problem for remote sensing applications in areas, such as search and rescue, wildfire detection, wildlife observation, surveillance, border control, and others. Airborne Optical Sectioning…
In this article, we describe and validate the first fully automatic parameter optimization for thermal synthetic aperture visualization. It replaces previous manual exploration of the parameter space, which is time consuming and error…
The safe operation of drone swarms beyond visual line of sight requires multiple safeguards to mitigate the risk of collision between drones flying in close-proximity scenarios. Cooperative navigation and flight coordination strategies that…
Airborne optical sectioning, an effective aerial synthetic aperture imaging technique for revealing artifacts occluded by forests, requires precise measurements of drone poses. In this article we present a new approach for reducing pose…
Drone swarms coupled with data intelligence can be the future of wildfire fighting. However, drone swarm firefighting faces enormous challenges, such as the highly complex environmental conditions in wildfire scenes, the highly dynamic…
Autonomous aerial tracking with drones offers vast potential for surveillance, cinematography, and industrial inspection applications. While single-drone tracking systems have been extensively studied, swarm-based target tracking remains…
Decentralized deployment of drone swarms usually relies on inter-agent communication or visual markers that are mounted on the vehicles to simplify their mutual detection. This letter proposes a vision-based detection and tracking algorithm…
This is the paper for the first place winning solution of the Drone vs. Bird Challenge, organized by AVSS 2021. As the usage of drones increases with lowered costs and improved drone technology, drone detection emerges as a vital object…
Drone swarms are required for the simultaneous delivery of multiple packages. We demonstrate a multi-stop drone swarm-based delivery in a smart city. We leverage formation flying to conserve energy and increase the flight range of a drone…
Smart City applications, such as traffic monitoring and disaster response, often use swarms of intelligent and cooperative drones to efficiently collect sensor data over different areas of interest and time spans. However, when the required…