Related papers: ARENA: Adaptive Risk-aware and Energy-efficient NA…
We present an efficient path planning algorithm for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle surveying a cluttered urban landscape. A special emphasis is on maximizing area surveyed while adhering to constraints of the UAV and partially known and…
Unexposed environments, such as lava tubes, mines, and tunnels, are among the most complex yet strategically significant domains for scientific exploration and infrastructure development. Accurate and real-time 3D meshing of these…
Agile mapless navigation in cluttered 3D environments poses significant challenges for autonomous drones. Conventional mapping-planning-control pipelines incur high computational cost and propagate estimation errors. We present AERO-MPPI, a…
In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used for numerous inspection and video capture tasks. Manually controlling UAVs in the vicinity of obstacles is challenging, however, and poses a high risk of collisions. Even for…
Unmanned aerial vehicles combined with computer vision systems, such as convolutional neural networks, offer a flexible and affordable solution for terrain monitoring, mapping, and detection tasks. However, a key challenge remains the…
Autonomous drone technology holds significant promise for enhancing search and rescue operations during evacuations by guiding humans toward safety and supporting broader emergency response efforts. However, their application in dynamic,…
Aerial robots are increasingly being utilized for environmental monitoring and exploration. However, a key challenge is efficiently planning paths to maximize the information value of acquired data as an initially unknown environment is…
This article presents a novel framework for performing visual inspection around 3D infrastructures, by establishing a team of fully autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with robust localization, planning and perception capabilities. The…
Route planning for multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a series of translation and rotational steps from a given start location to the destination goal location. The goal of the route planning problem is to determine the most…
This research presents an online path planner for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that can handle dynamic obstacles and UAV motion constraints, including maximum curvature and desired orientations. Our proposed planner uses a NURBS path…
Autonomous navigation in unstructured environments requires robots to assess terrain difficulty in real-time and plan paths that balance efficiency with safety. This thesis presents a traversability-aware navigation framework for the M4…
Smart Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have transformed infrastructure inspection by enabling efficient, high-resolution monitoring at various stages of construction, including hard-to-reach areas. Traditional manual operation of drones in…
This paper presents a new swarm intelligence-based approach to deal with the cooperative path planning problem of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which is essential for the automatic inspection of infrastructure. The approach uses a 3D…
We present RENEW, a global path planner for Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) in dynamic environments with external disturbances (e.g., water currents). RENEW introduces a unified risk- and energy-aware strategy that ensures safety by…
This paper proposes VLA-AN, an efficient and onboard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework dedicated to autonomous drone navigation in complex environments. VLA-AN addresses four major limitations of existing large aerial navigation…
Zero-Shot Object Navigation (ZSON) in unknown multi-floor environments presents a significant challenge. Recent methods, mostly based on semantic value greedy waypoint selection, spatial topology-enhanced memory, and Multimodal Large…
This paper presents a novel algorithm to plan energy-efficient trajectories for autonomous ornithopters. In general, trajectory optimization is quite a relevant problem for practical applications with \emph{Unmanned Aerial Vehicles} (UAVs).…
The employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the lowaltitude economy necessitates precise and real-time radio maps for reliable communication and safe navigation. However, constructing such maps is hindered by the infeasibility of…
Aerial outdoor semantic navigation requires robots to explore large, unstructured environments to locate target objects. Recent advances in semantic navigation have demonstrated open-set object-goal navigation in indoor settings, but these…
The ability to efficiently plan and execute automated and precise search missions using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during emergency response situations is imperative. Precise navigation between obstacles and time-efficient searching of…