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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…
Nano-size drones hold enormous potential to explore unknown and complex environments. Their small size makes them agile and safe for operation close to humans and allows them to navigate through narrow spaces. However, their tiny size and…
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…
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…
Tiny palm-sized aerial robots possess exceptional agility and cost-effectiveness in navigating confined and cluttered environments. However, their limited payload capacity directly constrains the sensing suite on-board the robot, thereby…
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…
Nano-sized drones, with palm-sized form factor, are gaining relevance in the Internet-of-Things ecosystem. Achieving a high degree of autonomy for complex multi-objective missions (e.g., safe flight, exploration, object detection) is…
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…
The rapid proliferation of drones requires balancing innovation with regulation. To address security and privacy concerns, techniques for drone detection have attracted significant attention.Passive solutions, such as frame camera-based…
Reliable deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cluttered unknown environments requires accurate sensors for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied localization and obstacle avoidance. Such a requirement limits the usage…
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…
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…
This work presents a multi-sensory anti-collision system design to achieve robust autonomous exploration capabilities for a swarm of 10 cm-side nano-drones operating on object detection missions. We combine lightweight single-beam laser…
Small aerial robots are particularly well-suited for search and rescue in confined and hazardous environments due to their agility, low cost, and ability to traverse through cluttered spaces that are inaccessible to larger platforms.…
We present a bootstrap perception system for indoor robot navigation under hardware depth failure. In our corridor data, the time-of-flight camera loses up to 78% of its depth pixels on reflective surfaces, yet a 2D LiDAR alone cannot sense…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation and mapping. These materials pose a unique problem for traditional…
Recent advances have improved autonomous navigation and mapping under payload constraints, but current multi-robot inspection algorithms are unsuitable for nano-drones due to their need for heavy sensors and high computational resources. To…
Obstacle detection is a safety-critical problem in robot navigation, where stereo matching is a popular vision-based approach. While deep neural networks have shown impressive results in computer vision, most of the previous obstacle…
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…
Nano quadcopters are small, agile, and cheap platforms that are well suited for deployment in narrow, cluttered environments. Due to their limited payload, these vehicles are highly constrained in processing power, rendering conventional…