Related papers: Drift-Corrected Monocular VIO and Perception-Aware…
Fast flights with aggressive maneuvers in cluttered GNSS-denied environments require fast, reliable, and accurate UAV state estimation. In this paper, we present an approach for onboard state estimation of a high-speed UAV using a monocular…
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…
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…
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…
Visual Active Tracking (VAT) aims to control cameras to follow a target in 3D space, which is critical for applications like drone navigation and security surveillance. However, it faces two key bottlenecks in real-world deployment:…
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…
Autonomous drone racing demands robust real-time localization under extreme conditions: high-speed flight, aggressive maneuvers, and payload-constrained platforms that often rely on a single camera for perception. Existing visual SLAM…
Visual inertial odometry (VIO) is widely used for the state estimation of multicopters, but it may function poorly in environments with few visual features or in overly aggressive flights. In this work, we propose a perception-aware…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Autonomous drone racing (ADR) demands state estimation that is simultaneously computationally efficient and resilient to the perceptual degradation experienced during extreme velocity and maneuvers. Traditional frameworks typically rely on…
Autonomous racing provides the opportunity to test safety-critical perception pipelines at their limit. This paper describes the practical challenges and solutions to applying state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms to build a…
Autonomous micro aerial vehicles still struggle with fast and agile maneuvers, dynamic environments, imperfect sensing, and state estimation drift. Autonomous drone racing brings these challenges to the fore. Human pilots can fly a…
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…
Globally-consistent localization in urban environments is crucial for autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles and drones, as well as assistive technologies for visually impaired people. Traditional Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO)…
Autonomous drones can operate in remote and unstructured environments, enabling various real-world applications. However, the lack of effective vision-based algorithms has been a stumbling block to achieving this goal. Existing systems…
Humans race drones faster than algorithms, despite being limited to a fixed camera angle, body rate control, and response latencies in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. A better understanding of the ability of human pilots of selecting…
Robotics is the next frontier in the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as the real world in which robots operate represents an enormous, complex, continuous state space with inherent real-time requirements. One extreme challenge in…