Related papers: Visual Environment Assessment for Safe Autonomous …

This paper considers the problem of finding a landing spot for a drone in a dense urban environment. The conflicting requirement of fast exploration and high resolution is solved using a multi-resolution approach, by which visual…

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…

Reliable perception of targets is crucial for the stable operation of autonomous robots. A widely preferred method is keypoint identification in an image, as it allows direct mapping from raw images to 2D coordinates, facilitating…

Robust and accurate localization for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is an essential capability to achieve autonomous, long-range flights. Current methods either rely heavily on GNSS, face limitations in visual-based localization due to…

Autonomous and safe landing is important for unmanned aerial vehicles. We present a monocular and stereo image based method for fast and accurate landing zone evaluation for UAVs in various scenarios. Many existing methods rely on Lidar or…

As the market for commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) booms, there is an increasing number of small, teleoperated or autonomous aircraft found in protected or sensitive airspace. Existing solutions for removal of these…

Safe flight in dynamic environments requires unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to make effective decisions when navigating cluttered spaces with moving obstacles. Traditional approaches often decompose decision-making into hierarchical…

In disaster-stricken environments, it's vital to assess the damage quickly, analyse the stability of the environment, and allocate resources to the most vulnerable areas where victims might be present. These missions are difficult and…

Hazard detection and avoidance is a key technology for future robotic small body sample return and lander missions. Current state-of-the-practice methods rely on high-fidelity, a priori terrain maps, which require extensive…

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…

Safe navigation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) requires not only obstacle-free flight paths according to a static environment map, but also the perception of and reaction to previously unknown and dynamic objects. This implies that the…

Autonomous missions of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are prone to collisions owing to environmental disturbances and localization errors. Consequently, a UAV that can endure collisions and perform recovery control in critical aerial…

We propose a machine learning enhanced algorithm for solving the optimal landing problem. Using Pontryagin's minimum principle, we derive a two-point boundary value problem for the landing problem. The proposed algorithm uses deep learning…

Collision detection and recovery for aerial robots remain a challenge because of the limited space for sensors and local stability of the flight controller. We introduce a novel collision-resilient quadrotor that features a compliant arm…

In this paper, we first present a method to autonomously detect helipads in real time. Our method does not rely on any machine-learning methods and as such is applicable in real-time on the computational capabilities of an average…

In this study, we propose a novel visual localization approach to accurately estimate six degrees of freedom (6-DoF) poses of the robot within the 3D LiDAR map based on visual data from an RGB camera. The 3D map is obtained utilizing an…

We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous…

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently shown great performance collecting visual data through autonomous exploration and mapping in building inspection. Yet, the number of studies is limited considering the post processing of the…

To navigate in an environment safely and autonomously, robots must accurately estimate where obstacles are and how they move. Instead of using expensive traditional 3D sensors, we explore the use of a much cheaper, faster, and higher…

Autonomous drones have gained considerable attention for applications in real-world scenarios, such as search and rescue, inspection, and delivery. As their use becomes ever more pervasive in civilian applications, failure to ensure safe…