Related papers: Palm-sized Omnidirectional Vision-Based UAV Explor…
A critical challenge in deploying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for autonomous tasks is their ability to navigate in an unknown environment. This paper introduces a novel vision-depth fusion approach for autonomous navigation on…
Autonomous exploration is a fundamental problem for various applications of unmanned aerial vehicles. Existing methods, however, were demonstrated to insufficient exploration rate, due to the lack of efficient global coverage, conservative…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) hold immense potential for critical applications, such as search and rescue operations, where accurate perception of indoor environments is paramount. However, the concurrent amalgamation of localization, 3D…
Navigation of a team of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) coordinated by an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is efficient and reliable for deep ocean exploration. AUVs depart from and return to the USV after collaborative navigation, data…
This paper introduces FALCON, a novel Fast Autonomous expLoration framework using COverage path guidaNce, which aims at setting a new performance benchmark in the field of autonomous aerial exploration. Despite recent advancements in the…
Safe navigation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) requires not only obstacle-free flight paths according to a static environment map, but also the perception of and reaction to previously unknown and dynamic objects. This implies that the…
Autonomous exploration requires robots to generate informative trajectories iteratively. Although sampling-based methods are highly efficient in unmanned aerial vehicle exploration, many of these methods do not effectively utilize the…
Recent research has enabled fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to maneuver in constrained spaces through the use of direct nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). However, this approach has been limited to a priori known maps and…
We propose DeepExplorer, a simple and lightweight metric-free exploration method for topological mapping of unknown environments. It performs task and motion planning (TAMP) entirely in image feature space. The task planner is a recurrent…
Autonomous robots navigating in off-road terrain like forests open new opportunities for automation. While off-road navigation has been studied, existing work often relies on clearly delineated pathways. We present a method allowing for…
Obstacle avoidance in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as a fundamental capability, has gained increasing attention with the growing focus on spatial intelligence. However, current obstacle-avoidance methods mainly depend on limited…
Heterogeneous teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can enhance the exploration capabilities of aerial robots by exploiting different strengths and abilities of varying UAVs. This paper presents a novel method for exploring unknown…
We present an open-source system for Micro-Aerial Vehicle autonomous navigation from vision-based sensing. Our system focuses on dense mapping, safe local planning, and global trajectory generation, especially when using narrow field of…
While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant traction across various fields, path planning in 3D environments remains a critical challenge, particularly under size, weight, and power (SWAP) constraints. Traditional modular…
Localization is one of the most crucial tasks for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle systems (UAVs) directly impacting overall performance, which can be achieved with various sensors and applied to numerous tasks related to search and rescue…
Planning the path to gather the surface information of the target objects is crucial to improve the efficiency of and reduce the overall cost, for visual inspection applications with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Coverage Path Planning…
This paper presents a novel approach for autonomous cooperating UAVs in search and rescue operations in subterranean domains with complex topology. The proposed system was ranked second in the Virtual Track of the DARPA SubT Finals as part…
Autonomous navigation is needed for several robotics applications. In this paper we present an autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) system which purely relies on cost-effective and light-weight passive visual and inertial sensors to…
Aerial mapping systems are important for many surveying applications (e.g., industrial inspection or agricultural monitoring). Aerial platforms that can fly GPS-guided preplanned missions semi-autonomously are already widely available but…
Recent advances in cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) methods have shown strong potential for supporting unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in GNSS-denied environments. However, existing work predominantly focuses on matching UAV…