A lightweight quadrotor autonomy system: To navigate in densely cluttered forest environments

These days, people see more and more applications for drones, including monitoring rainforests to protect plant and animal species. However, drones face challenges when navigating through the dense and cluttered vegetation of the forest. These environments necessitate advanced autonomous detection and navigation to make the drone traverse...

Naval engineering and ship control special edition editorial

Editorial Special Issue: Naval Engineering and Ship Control II

The effect of autonomous systems on the crew size of ships–a case study

Recently, autonomous ships have gotten a lot more attention both in the media and in research. However, very little research has focussed on the effects of automation on the size of the crew. This paper analyses the effects of added automation on the required size and composition of the crew on a 750 TEU short sea container vessel. A Crew...

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Goal-directed Visual Navigation

Safe navigation in a cluttered environment is a key capability for the autonomous operation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). This work explores a (deep) Reinforcement Learning (RL) based approach for monocular vision based obstacle avoidance and goal directed navigation for MAVs in cluttered environments. We investigated this problem in the...

A General Purpose Control Design For Vision Based Autonomous Quadrotor Navigation

Quadrotors  are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which are controlled by changing the angular speed of the four rotors. In the recent years, they have received a large  attention from the research community thanks to their  vertical take-off and landing capability, small dimension, payload, flight endurance and low price  which it has increased...

Human-Aware Autonomous Navigation of a Care Robot in Domestic Environments

A major societal challenge in occidental countries nowadays is the continuously increasing ageing population. Due to this ageing society, solutions are needed to alleviate the limited care personnel and the ever increasing healthcare costs. To this end, service robots are proposed to meet this demand by assisting the elderly with their daily...

Stability-based Scale Estimation of Monocular SLAM for Autonomous Quadrotor Navigation

We propose a novel method to deal with the scale ambiguity in monocular SLAM based on control stability. We analytically show that (1) using unscaled state feedback from monocular SLAM for control can lead to system instability, and (2) there is a unique linear relationship between the absolute scale of the SLAM system and the control gain at...