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Autonomous drone racing competitions are a proxy to improve unmanned aerial vehicles' perception, planning, and control skills. The recent emergence of autonomous nano-sized drone racing imposes new challenges, as their ~10cm form factor…
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…
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…
Precise relative localization is a crucial functional block for swarm robotics. This work presents a novel autonomous end-to-end system that addresses the monocular relative localization, through deep neural networks (DNNs), of two peer…
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…
Drones are increasingly used in fields like industry, medicine, research, disaster relief, defense, and security. Technical challenges, such as navigation in GPS-denied environments, hinder further adoption. Research in visual odometry is…
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…
Event-based vision has already revolutionized the perception task for robots by promising faster response, lower energy consumption, and lower bandwidth without introducing motion blur. In this work, a novel deep learning method based on…
Sub-10cm diameter nano-drones are gaining momentum thanks to their applicability in scenarios prevented to bigger flying drones, such as in narrow environments and close to humans. However, their tiny form factor also brings their major…
Nano-size unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with few centimeters of diameter and sub-10 Watts of total power budget, have so far been considered incapable of running sophisticated visual-based autonomous navigation software without external…
Autonomous nano-drones, powered by vision-based tiny machine learning (TinyML) models, are a novel technology gaining momentum thanks to their broad applicability and pushing scientific advancement on resource-limited embedded systems.…
Autonomous drone racing requires powerful perception, planning, and control and has become a benchmark and test field for autonomous, agile flight. Existing work usually assumes static race tracks with known maps, which enables offline…
Relative drone-to-drone localization is a fundamental building block for any swarm operations. We address this task in the context of miniaturized nano-drones, i.e., 10cm in diameter, which show an ever-growing interest due to novel use…
This paper presents a vision-only autonomous flight system for small UAVs operating in controlled indoor environments. The system combines semantic segmentation with monocular depth estimation to enable obstacle avoidance, scene…
Miniaturized autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are gaining popularity due to their small size, enabling new tasks such as indoor navigation or people monitoring. Nonetheless, their size and simple electronics pose severe challenges…
In autonomous and mobile robotics, one of the main challenges is the robust on-the-fly perception of the environment, which is often unknown and dynamic, like in autonomous drone racing. In this work, we propose a novel deep neural…
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…
Navigating unmanned aerial vehicles in environments where GPS signals are unavailable poses a compelling and intricate challenge. This challenge is further heightened when dealing with Nano Aerial Vehicles (NAVs) due to their compact size,…
Nano-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are ideal candidates for flying Internet-of-Things smart sensors to collect information in narrow spaces. This requires ultra-fast navigation under very tight memory/computation constraints. The…
Autonomous drone racing requires the tight coupling of perception, planning, and control under extreme agility. However, recent approaches typically rely on precomputed spatial reference trajectories or explicit 6-DoF gate pose estimation,…