Related papers: VisFly: An Efficient and Versatile Simulator for T…

In this work, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm for visual policy learning that leverages differentiable simulation and first-order analytical policy gradients. Our approach decouple the rendering process from the computation…

ViVa-SAFELAND is an open source software library, aimed to test and evaluate vision-based navigation strategies for aerial vehicles, with special interest in autonomous landing, while complying with legal regulations and people's safety. It…

Autonomous air taxis are poised to revolutionize urban mass transportation, however, ensuring their safety and reliability remains an open challenge. Validating autonomy solutions on air taxis in the real world presents complexities, risks,…

We tackle the problem of minimum-time flight for a quadrotor through a sequence of waypoints in the presence of obstacles while exploiting the full quadrotor dynamics. Early works relied on simplified dynamics or polynomial trajectory…

In this paper, we present a novel developmental reinforcement learning-based controller for a quadcopter with thrust vectoring capabilities. This multirotor UAV design has tilt-enabled rotors. It utilizes the rotor force magnitude and…

Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising and powerful technique for automatically acquiring control policies that can process raw sensory inputs, such as images, and perform complex behaviors. However, extending deep RL to…

Significant challenges are posed by simulation and testing in the field of low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) traffic due to the high costs associated with large-scale UAV testing and the complexity of establishing low-altitude…

Natural flyers use soft wings to seamlessly enable a wide range of flight behaviours, including agile manoeuvres, squeezing through narrow passageways, and withstanding collisions. In contrast, conventional quadrotor designs rely on rigid…

In this work, we introduce OmniDrones, an efficient and flexible platform tailored for reinforcement learning in drone control, built on Nvidia's Omniverse Isaac Sim. It employs a bottom-up design approach that allows users to easily design…

The visual camera is an attractive device in beyond visual line of sight (B-VLOS) drone operation, since they are low in size, weight, power, and cost, and can provide redundant modality to GPS failures. However, state-of-the-art visual…

Small flying robots can perform landing maneuvers using bio-inspired optical flow by maintaining a constant divergence. However, optical flow is typically estimated from frame sequences recorded by standard miniature cameras. This requires…

Co-simulation is a critical approach for the design and analysis of complex cyber-physical systems. It will enhance development efficiency and reduce costs. This paper presents a co-simulation framework integrating ROS 2 and MATLAB/Simulink…

Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in complex missions that demand reliable autonomous navigation and robust obstacle avoidance. However, traditional modular pipelines often incur cumulative latency, whereas…

We present a novel framework demonstrating zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of visual control policies learned in a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) environment for quadrotors to fly through racing gates. Robust transfer from simulation to real…

We introduce VisTA, a new reinforcement learning framework that empowers visual agents to dynamically explore, select, and combine tools from a diverse library based on empirical performance. Existing methods for tool-augmented reasoning…

Ego-vision-based navigation in cluttered environments is crucial for mobile systems, particularly agile quadrotors. While learning-based methods have shown promise recently, head-to-head comparisons with cutting-edge optimization-based…

Simulating realistic environments for robots is widely recognized as a critical challenge in robot learning, particularly in terms of rendering and physical simulation. This challenge becomes even more pronounced in navigation tasks, where…

This paper studies the problem of predicting future trajectories of people in unseen cameras of novel scenarios and views. We approach this problem through the real-data-free setting in which the model is trained only on 3D simulation data…

Robots trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Imitation Learning (IL) often adapt slowly to new tasks, whereas recent Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) promise knowledge-rich planning from minimal data.…

Scenario-based testing using simulations is a cornerstone of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) software validation. So far, developers needed to choose between low-fidelity 2D simulators to explore the scenario space efficiently, and high-fidelity…