Related papers: Autonomous Navigation at the Nano-Scale: Algorithm…
Autonomous micro-mobility platforms face challenges from the perspective of the typical deployment environment: large indoor spaces or urban areas that are potentially crowded and highly dynamic. While social navigation algorithms have…
Despite the growing impact of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) across various industries, most of current available solutions lack for a robust autonomous navigation system to deal with the appearance of obstacles safely. This work presents…
Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exhibit immense potential for navigating indoor and hard-to-reach areas, yet their significant constraints in payload and autonomy have largely prevented their use for complex tasks like high-quality…
This paper presents the design and implementation of a self-reconfigurable V-shape formation controller for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) navigating through narrow spaces in a dense obstacle environment. The selection of the…
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.…
Zero-Shot Object Navigation in unknown environments poses significant challenges for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) due to the conflict between high-level semantic reasoning requirements and limited onboard computational resources. To…
This paper proposes VLA-AN, an efficient and onboard Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework dedicated to autonomous drone navigation in complex environments. VLA-AN addresses four major limitations of existing large aerial navigation…
In this paper, we address the challenge of exploring unknown indoor aerial environments using autonomous aerial robots with Size Weight and Power (SWaP) constraints. The SWaP constraints induce limits on mission time requiring efficiency in…
Autonomous aerial target tracking in unstructured and GPS-denied environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Many existing methods rely on motion capture systems, pre-mapped scenes, or feature-based localization to ensure…
This paper presents a vision-only autonomous flight system for small UAVs operating in controlled indoor environments. The system combines semantic segmentation with monocular depth estimation to enable obstacle avoidance, scene…
Navigation applications relying on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) are limited in indoor environments and GNSS-denied outdoor terrains such as dense urban or forests. In this paper, we present a novel accurate, robust and…
Small body exploration is a pertinent challenge due to low gravity environments and strong sensitivity to perturbations like Solar Radiation Pressure (SRP). Thus, autonomous methods are being developed to enable safe navigation and control…
The navigation systems of autonomous aircraft rely on the readings provided by a suite of onboard sensors to estimate the aircraft state. In the case of fixed wing vehicles, the sensor suite is composed by triads of accelerometers,…
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…
Visual robot navigation within large-scale, semi-structured environments deals with various challenges such as computation intensive path planning algorithms or insufficient knowledge about traversable spaces. Moreover, many…
For autonomous vehicles to operate without human intervention, information sharing from local sensors plays a fundamental role. This can be challenging to handle with bandwidth-constrained communication systems, which calls for the adoption…
Driven by the unprecedented high throughput and low latency requirements in next-generation wireless networks, this paper introduces an artificial intelligence (AI) enabled framework in which unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) use…
In this paper, we address the challenge of navigating through unknown indoor environments using autonomous aerial robots within confined spaces. The core of our system involves the integration of key sensor technologies, including depth…
Autonomous navigation in maritime domains is accelerating alongside advances in artificial intelligence, sensing, and connectivity. Opaque decision-making and poorly calibrated human-automation interaction remain key barriers to safe…
Consider an assistive system that guides visually impaired users through speech and haptic feedback to their destination. Existing robotic and ubiquitous navigation technologies (e.g., portable, ground, or wearable systems) often operate in…