Hover and fast flight of minimum-mass mission-capable flying robots

Highly automated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or "flying robots" are rapidly becoming an important asset to society. The last decade has seen the advent of an impressive number of new UAV types and applications. For many applications, the UAVs need to be safe, highly automated, and versatile. Safety is a prerequisite to allowing their use in...

Visual Navigation and Optimal Control for Autonomous Drone Racing

Drones, especially quadrotors, have shown their great value for applications like aerial photography, object delivery and warehouse inspection. At the same time, with the de- velopment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), computers can replace humans and even per- form better than humans in some areas where it was impossible before like the AI pro-...

Visual model-predictive localization for computationally efficient autonomous racing of a 72-g drone

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 novel sensor fusion method called visual model-predictive localization (VML). Within a small time window, VML approximates...

In-flight model parameter and state estimation using gradient descent for high-speed flight

High-speed flight in GPS-denied environments is currently an important frontier in the research on autonomous flight of micro air vehicles. Autonomous drone races stimulate the advances in this area by representing a very challenging case with tight turns, texture-less floors, and dynamic spectators around the track. These properties hamper...