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Reliable obstacle avoidance in industrial settings demands 3D scene understanding, but widely used 2D LiDAR sensors perceive only a single horizontal slice of the environment, missing critical obstacles above or below the scan plane. We…
Autonomous drone racing represents a major frontier in robotics research. It requires an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can run on board light-weight flying robots under tight resource and time constraints, while pushing the physical…
Drone racing is a recreational sport in which the goal is to pass through a sequence of gates in a minimum amount of time while avoiding collisions. In autonomous drone racing, one must accomplish this task by flying fully autonomously in…
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…
Drone racing is becoming a popular e-sport all over the world, and beating the best human drone race pilots has quickly become a new major challenge for artificial intelligence and robotics. In this paper, we propose a strategy for…
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…
We present NAVREN-RL, an approach to NAVigate an unmanned aerial vehicle in an indoor Real ENvironment via end-to-end reinforcement learning RL. A suitable reward function is designed keeping in mind the cost and weight constraints for…
Sub-\SI{50}{\gram} nano-drones are gaining momentum in both academia and industry. Their most compelling applications rely on onboard deep learning models for perception despite severe hardware constraints (\ie sub-\SI{100}{\milli\watt}…
Autonomous navigation by drones using onboard sensors, combined with deep learning and computer vision algorithms, is impacting a number of domains. We examine the use of drones to autonomously follow and assist Visually Impaired People…
Pocket-sized autonomous nano-drones can revolutionize many robotic use cases, such as visual inspection in narrow, constrained spaces, and ensure safer human-robot interaction due to their tiny form factor and weight -- i.e., tens of grams.…
Sub-30g nano-sized aerial robots can leverage their agility and form factor to autonomously explore cluttered and narrow environments, like in industrial inspection and search and rescue missions. However, the price for their tiny size is a…
This paper presents a novel approach for aerial drone autonomous navigation along predetermined paths using only visual input form an onboard camera and without reliance on a Global Positioning System (GPS). It is based on using a deep…
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…
Biological sensing and processing is asynchronous and sparse, leading to low-latency and energy-efficient perception and action. In robotics, neuromorphic hardware for event-based vision and spiking neural networks promises to exhibit…
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…
Autonomous nano-drones (~10 cm in diameter), thanks to their ultra-low power TinyML-based brains, are capable of coping with real-world environments. However, due to their simplified sensors and compute units, they are still far from the…
Event cameras provide low-latency perception for only milliwatts of power. This makes them highly suitable for resource-restricted, agile robots such as small flying drones. Self-supervised learning based on contrast maximization holds…
Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are strongly limited in their payload and power capacity. In order to implement autonomous navigation, algorithms are therefore desirable that use sensory equipment that is as small, low-weight, and low-power…
Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the context of…
Ego-motion estimation is vital for drones when flying in GPS-denied environments. Vision-based methods struggle when flight speed increases and close-by objects lead to difficult visual conditions with considerable motion blur and large…