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The efficacy of UAV swarm cooperative perception fundamentally depends on three-dimensional (3D) formation geometry, which governs target observability and sensor complementarity. In the literature, the exploitation of formation geometry…
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…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are frequently used for aerial mapping and general monitoring tasks. Recent progress in deep learning enabled automated semantic segmentation of imagery to facilitate the interpretation of large-scale complex…
Autonomous navigation for nano-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (nano-UAVs) is governed by extreme Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints (with the weight < 50 g and sub-100 mW onboard processor), distinguishing it fundamentally from…
Search and rescue (SAR) missions require reliable search methods to locate survivors, especially in challenging or inaccessible environments. This is why introducing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be of great help to enhance the…
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…
Mapless navigation has emerged as a promising approach for enabling autonomous robots to navigate in environments where pre-existing maps may be inaccurate, outdated, or unavailable. In this work, we propose an image-based local…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are crucial in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions due to their ability to monitor vast maritime areas. However, small objects often remain difficult to detect from high altitudes due to low object-to-background…
Today, low-altitude fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are largely limited to primitively follow user-defined waypoints. To allow fully-autonomous remote missions in complex environments, real-time environment-aware navigation is…
This work presents an innovative solution for robotic odometry, path planning and exploration in wild unknown environments, focusing on digital modelling. The approach uses a minimum cost formulation with pseudo-randomly generated…
A prior global topological map (e.g., the OpenStreetMap, OSM) can boost the performance of autonomous mapping by a ground mobile robot. However, the prior map is usually incomplete due to lacking labeling in partial paths. To solve this…
This paper studies optimal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) placement to ensure line-of-sight (LOS) communication and sensing for a cluster of ground users possibly in deep shadow, while the UAV maintains backhaul connectivity with a base…
Efficient exploration strategies are vital in tasks such as search-and-rescue missions and disaster surveying. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become particularly popular in such applications, promising to cover large areas at high…
Robotic mapping is attractive in many scientific applications that involve environmental surveys. This paper presents a system for localization and mapping of sparsely distributed surface features such as precariously balanced rocks (PBRs),…
An unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV) is sent on a mission to explore and reconstruct an unknown environment from a series of measurements collected by Bayesian optimization. The success of the mission is judged by the UAV's ability to…
We propose a novel real-time direct monocular visual odometry for omnidirectional cameras. Our method extends direct sparse odometry (DSO) by using the unified omnidirectional model as a projection function, which can be applied to fisheye…
Aerial pixel-wise scene perception of the surrounding environment is an important task for UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Previous research works mainly adopt conventional pinhole cameras or fisheye cameras as the imaging device. However,…
The remarkable growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has also sparked concerns about safety measures during their missions. To advance towards safer autonomous aerial robots, this work presents a vision-based solution to ensuring safe…
Existing exploration algorithms mainly generate frontiers using random sampling or motion primitive methods within a specific sensor range or search space. However, frontiers generated within constrained spaces lead to back-and-forth…
We present a waypoint planning algorithm for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is teamed with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) for the task of search and rescue in a subterranean environment. The UAV and UGV are teamed such that the…