Related papers: Demonstrating Agile Flight from Pixels without Sta…
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…
This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first autonomous…
Although quadrotors, and aerial robots in general, are inherently active agents, their perceptual capabilities in literature so far have been mostly passive in nature. Researchers and practitioners today use traditional computer vision…
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…
Recently, neural control policies have outperformed existing model-based planning-and-control methods for autonomously navigating quadrotors through cluttered environments in minimum time. However, they are not perception aware, a crucial…
In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the time-optimal trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming…
Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and low latency, making them ideal sensors for high-speed robotic applications where conventional cameras suffer from image degradations such as motion blur. In addition, their low power…
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,…
Optical flow captures the motion of pixels in an image sequence over time, providing information about movement, depth, and environmental structure. Flying insects utilize this information to navigate and avoid obstacles, allowing them to…
Learning visuomotor policies for agile quadrotor flight presents significant difficulties, primarily from inefficient policy exploration caused by high-dimensional visual inputs and the need for precise and low-latency control. To address…
Inertial odometry is an attractive solution to the problem of state estimation for agile quadrotor flight. It is inexpensive, lightweight, and it is not affected by perceptual degradation. However, only relying on the integration of the…
Autonomous drone racing has attracted increasing interest as a research topic for exploring the limits of agile flight. However, existing studies primarily focus on obstacle-free racetracks, while the perception and dynamic challenges…
Agile flight for the quadrotor cable-suspended payload system is a formidable challenge due to its underactuated, highly nonlinear, and hybrid dynamics. Traditional optimization-based methods often struggle with high computational costs and…
A long-cherished vision of drones is to autonomously traverse through clutter to reach every corner of the world using onboard sensing and computation. In this paper, we combine onboard 3D lidar sensing and sim-to-real reinforcement…
We present a multirotor architecture capable of aggressive autonomous flight and collision-free teleoperation in unstructured, GPS-denied environments. The proposed system enables aggressive and safe autonomous flight around clutter by…
In this paper, we tackle the problem of flying a quadrotor using time-optimal control policies that can be replanned online when the environment changes or when encountering unknown disturbances. This problem is challenging as the…
Autonomous drone racing (ADR) systems have recently achieved champion-level performance, yet remain highly specific to drone racing. While end-to-end vision-based methods promise broader applicability, no system to date simultaneously…
Drones are enabling new forms of cinematography. However, quadrotor cinematography requires accurate comprehension of the scene, technical skill of flying, artistic skill of composition and simultaneous realization of all the requirements…
Flying through body-size narrow gaps in the environment is one of the most challenging moments for an underactuated multirotor. We explore a purely data-driven method to master this flight skill in simulation, where a neural network…
Autonomous aerial cinematography has the potential to enable automatic capture of aesthetically pleasing videos without requiring human intervention, empowering individuals with the capability of high-end film studios. Current approaches…