Flycon: Real-time environment-independent multi-view human pose estimation with aerial vehicles

We propose a real-time method for the infrastructure-free estimation of articulated human motion. The approach leverages a swarm of camer aequipped flying robots and jointly optimizes the swarm's and skeletal states, which include the 3D joint positions and a set of bones. Our method allows to track the motion of human subjects, for example...

Distributed multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments

This paper presents a distributed method for formation control of a homogeneous team of aerial or ground mobile robots navigating in environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Each robot in the team has a finite communication and visibility radius and shares information with its neighbors to coordinate. Our approach leverages both...

Compositional and contract-based verification for autonomous driving on road networks

Recent advances in autonomous driving have raised the problem of safety<br/>to the forefront and incentivized research into establishing safety guarantees. In this paper, we propose a safety verification framework as a safety standard for driving controllers with full or shared autonomy based on compositional and contract-based principles. Our...

Multi-robot formation control and object transport in dynamic environments via constrained optimization

We present a constrained optimization method for multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments, where the robots adjust the parameters of the formation, such as size and three-dimensional orientation, to avoid collisions with static and moving obstacles, and to make progress towards their goal. We describe two variants of the...

Reactive mission and motion planning with deadlock resolution avoiding dynamic obstacles

In the near future mobile robots, such as personal robots or mobile manipulators, will share the workspace with other robots and humans. We present a method for mission and motion planning that applies to small teams of robots performing a task in an environment with moving obstacles, such as humans. Given a mission specification written in...

Safe nonlinear trajectory generation for parallel autonomy with a dynamic vehicle model

High-end vehicles are already equipped with safety systems, such as assistive braking and automatic lane following, enhancing vehicle safety. Yet, these current solutions can only help in low-complexity driving situations. In this paper, we introduce a parallel autonomy, or shared control, framework that computes safe trajectories for an...

Parallel autonomy in automated vehicles: Safe motion generation with minimal intervention

Current state-of-the-art vehicle safety systems, such as assistive braking or automatic lane following, are still only able to help in relatively simple driving situations. We introduce a Parallel Autonomy shared-control framework that produces safe trajectories based on human inputs even in much more complex driving scenarios, such as those...

Robust collision avoidance for multiple micro aerial vehicles using nonlinear model predictive control

When several Multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) share the same airspace, reliable and robust collision avoidance is required. In this paper we address the problem of multi-MAV reactive collision avoidance. We employ a model-based controller to simultaneously track a reference trajectory and avoid collisions. Moreover, to achieve a higher...

Predictive routing for autonomous mobility-on-demand systems with ride-sharing

Ride-sharing, or carpooling, systems with autonomous vehicles will provide efficient and reliable urban mobility on demand. In this work we present a method for dynamic vehicle routing that leverages historical data to improve the performance of a network of self-driving taxis. In particular, we describe a constrained optimization method...

Towards Estimation and Correction of Wind Effects on a Quadrotor UAV

In this paper the problem of estimation and correction of wind effects on a quadrotor UAV, without using wind sensors, is discussed. A large body of research addresses the effects of wind on a quadrotor, however most of them consider it only as a disturbance in their control loop and, for this reason, they solved the problem compensating for the...