Related papers: MonoRace: Winning Champion-Level Drone Racing with…

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…

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…

The Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League(A2RL) x Drone Champions League competition(DCL) requires teams to perform high-speed autonomous drone racing using only a single camera and a low-quality inertial measurement unit -- a minimal sensor…

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…

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…

This paper presents the OmniRace approach to controlling a racing drone with 6-degree of freedom (DoF) hand pose estimation and gesture recognition. To our knowledge, it is the first-ever technology that allows for low-level control of…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Drone technology is proliferating in many industries, including agriculture, logistics, defense, infrastructure, and environmental monitoring. Vision-based autonomy is one of its key enablers, particularly for real-world applications. This…

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 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…

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…

Over the last decade, the use of autonomous drone systems for surveying, search and rescue, or last-mile delivery has increased exponentially. With the rise of these applications comes the need for highly robust, safety-critical algorithms…

Autonomous drone racing is a challenging research problem at the intersection of computer vision, planning, state estimation, and control. We introduce AirSim Drone Racing Lab, a simulation framework for enabling fast prototyping of…

Vision is an essential part of attitude control for many flying animals, some of which have no dedicated sense of gravity. Flying robots, on the other hand, typically depend heavily on accelerometers and gyroscopes for attitude…

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…

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…