Related papers: AI and Vision based Autonomous Navigation of Nano-…
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…
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…
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 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…
Deploying tiny computer vision Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on-board nano-sized drones is key for achieving autonomy, but is complicated by the extremely tight constraints of their computational platforms (approximately 10 MiB memory, 1 W…
Autonomous navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles faces key challenges from limited onboard computational resources, which restrict deployed deep neural networks to shallow architectures incapable of handling complex environments.…
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…
Palm-sized autonomous nano-drones, i.e., sub-50g in weight, recently entered the drone racing scenario, where they are tasked to avoid obstacles and navigate as fast as possible through gates. However, in contrast with their bigger…
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…
Nano quadcopters are small, agile, and cheap platforms that are well suited for deployment in narrow, cluttered environments. Due to their limited payload, these vehicles are highly constrained in processing power, rendering conventional…
Artificial intelligence-powered pocket-sized air robots have the potential to revolutionize the Internet-of-Things ecosystem, acting as autonomous, unobtrusive, and ubiquitous smart sensors. With a few cm$^{2}$ form-factor, nano-sized…
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-UAV teams offer great agility yet face severe navigation challenges due to constrained onboard sensing, communication, and computation. Existing approaches rely on high-resolution vision or compute-intensive planners, rendering them…
Nano-quadcopters are versatile platforms attracting the interest of both academia and industry. Their tiny form factor, i.e., $\,$10 cm diameter, makes them particularly useful in narrow scenarios and harmless in human proximity. However,…
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…
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…
Accurate navigation is of paramount importance to ensure flight safety and efficiency for autonomous drones. Recent research starts to use Deep Neural Networks to enhance drone navigation given their remarkable predictive capability for…
Vision-based object tracking is an essential precursor to performing autonomous aerial navigation in order to avoid obstacles. Biologically inspired neuromorphic event cameras are emerging as a powerful alternative to frame-based cameras,…
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…
This paper introduces an advanced AI-driven perception system for autonomous quadcopter navigation in GPS-denied indoor environments. The proposed framework leverages cloud computing to offload computationally intensive tasks and…