Related papers: VizFlyt: Perception-centric Pedagogical Framework …
We present VisFly, a quadrotor simulator designed to efficiently train vision-based flight policies using reinforcement learning algorithms. VisFly offers a user-friendly framework and interfaces, leveraging Habitat-Sim's rendering engines…
This paper presents a system for hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control algorithms implemented on a heterogeneous SoC FPGA computing platforms. The AirSim simulator running on a PC and an Arty Z7…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have numerous applications, but their efficient and optimal flight can be a challenge. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to address this challenge, yet there is no standardized…
As the global population ages, effective rehabilitation and mobility aids will become increasingly critical. Gait assistive robots are promising solutions, but designing adaptable controllers for various impairments poses a significant…
Developing and testing algorithms for autonomous vehicles in real world is an expensive and time consuming process. Also, in order to utilize recent advances in machine intelligence and deep learning we need to collect a large amount of…
The main motivation of this work is to propose a simulation approach for a specific task within the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) field, i.e., the visual detection and tracking of arbitrary moving objects. In particular, it is described…
Autonomous, agile quadrotor flight raises fundamental challenges for robotics research in terms of perception, planning, learning, and control. A versatile and standardized platform is needed to accelerate research and let practitioners…
Data driven robotics relies upon accurate real-world representations to learn useful policies. Despite our best-efforts, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer is still an unsolved problem, and we often need to allow our agents to explore online to…
PiDrone is a quadrotor platform created to accompany an introductory robotics course. Students build an autonomous flying robot from scratch and learn to program it through assignments and projects. Existing educational robots do not have…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in computer science education through AI-assisted programming tools, yet such workflows often exhibit objective drift, in which locally plausible outputs diverge from stated task…
This paper describes an approach to building a cost-effective and research grade visual-inertial odometry aided vertical taking-off and landing (VTOL) platform. We utilize an off-the-shelf visual-inertial sensor, an onboard computer, and a…
Autonomous drone racing has risen as a challenging robotic benchmark for testing the limits of learning, perception, planning, and control. Expert human pilots are able to fly a drone through a race track by mapping pixels from a single…
This article presents a novel telepresence system for advancing aerial manipulation in dynamic and unstructured environments. The proposed system not only features a haptic device, but also a virtual reality (VR) interface that provides…
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to guide agents by leveraging language instructions and visual cues, playing a pivotal role in embodied AI. Indoor VLN has been extensively studied, whereas outdoor aerial VLN remains underexplored. The…
Aerial vision-language navigation (AVLN) enables UAVs to follow natural-language instructions in complex 3D environments. However, existing zero-shot AVLN methods often suffer from unstable single-stream Vision-Language Model…
We present VLH, a novel Visual-Language-Haptic Foundation Model that unifies perception, language, and tactile feedback in aerial robotics and virtual reality. Unlike prior work that treats haptics as a secondary, reactive channel, VLH…
We present a conceptual framework for training Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to perform Visual Perspective Taking (VPT), a core capability for embodied cognition essential for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). As a first step toward this goal,…
Small multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), mainly quadcopters, are nowadays ubiquitous in research on aerial autonomy, including serving as scaled-down models for much larger aircraft such as vertical-take-off-and-lift vehicles for…
Few-shot object detection has drawn increasing attention in the field of robotic exploration, where robots are required to find unseen objects with a few online provided examples. Despite recent efforts have been made to yield online…
Over the past decade, machine learning has demonstrated impressive results, often surpassing human capabilities in sensing tasks relevant to autonomous flight. Unlike traditional aerospace software, the parameters of machine learning models…