Related papers: One Net to Rule Them All: Domain Randomization in …
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…
Autonomous drone racing has gained attention for its potential to push the boundaries of drone navigation technologies. While much of the existing research focuses on racing in obstacle-free environments, few studies have addressed the…
This paper proposes an adaptive near-hover position controller for quadcopters, which can be deployed to quadcopters of very different mass, size and motor constants, and also shows rapid adaptation to unknown disturbances during runtime.…
This paper introduces a learning-based low-level controller for quadcopters, which adaptively controls quadcopters with significant variations in mass, size, and actuator capabilities. Our approach leverages a combination of imitation…
Quadcopters have been studied for decades thanks to their maneuverability and capability of operating in a variety of circumstances. However, quadcopters suffer from dynamical nonlinearity, actuator saturation, as well as sensor noise that…
Autonomous UAV racing has recently emerged as an interesting research problem. The dream is to beat humans in this new fast-paced sport. A common approach is to learn an end-to-end policy that directly predicts controls from raw images by…
Bridging the 'reality gap' that separates simulated robotics from experiments on hardware could accelerate robotic research through improved data availability. This paper explores domain randomization, a simple technique for training models…
Deep Reinforcement learning has shown to be a powerful tool for developing policies in environments where an optimal solution is unclear. In this paper, we attempt to apply Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients to train a neural…
Redundancy and parallelism make decentralized multi-robot systems appealing solutions for the exploration of extreme environments. However, effective cooperation often requires team-wide connectivity and a carefully designed communication…
Developing optimal controllers for aggressive high-speed quadcopter flight poses significant challenges in robotics. Recent trends in the field involve utilizing neural network controllers trained through supervised or reinforcement…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has made it possible to solve complex robotics problems using neural networks as function approximators. However, the policies trained on stationary environments suffer in terms of generalization when…
Domain Randomization (DR) is commonly used for sim2real transfer of reinforcement learning (RL) policies in robotics. Most DR approaches require a simulator with a fixed set of tunable parameters from the start of the training, from which…
Quadrotor stabilizing controllers often require careful, model-specific tuning for safe operation. We use reinforcement learning to train policies in simulation that transfer remarkably well to multiple different physical quadrotors. Our…
This paper presents a vision-based modularized drone racing navigation system that uses a customized convolutional neural network (CNN) for the perception module to produce high-level navigation commands and then leverages a…
It is often necessary for drones to complete delivery, photography, and rescue in the shortest time to increase efficiency. Many autonomous drone races provide platforms to pursue algorithms to finish races as quickly as possible for the…
Networks of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), composed of hundreds, possibly thousands of highly mobile and wirelessly connected flying drones will play a vital role in future Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G networks. However, how to control…
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…
Precise near-ground trajectory control is difficult for multi-rotor drones, due to the complex aerodynamic effects caused by interactions between multi-rotor airflow and the environment. Conventional control methods often fail to properly…
Reaching fast and autonomous flight requires computationally efficient and robust algorithms. To this end, we train Guidance & Control Networks to approximate optimal control policies ranging from energy-optimal to time-optimal flight. We…
Autonomous drone racing has attracted increasing interest as a research topic for exploring the limits of agile flight. However, existing studies primarily focus on obstacle-free racetracks, while the perception and dynamic challenges…