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C. de Wagter

117 records found

The real-world application of small drones is mostly hampered by energy limitations. Neuromorphic computing promises extremely energy-efficient AI for autonomous flight but is still challenging to train and deploy on real robots. To reap the maximal benefits from neuromorphic com ...
Since every flight ends in a landing and every landing is a potential crash, deceleration during landing is one of the most critical flying maneuvers. Here we implement a recently-discovered insect visual-guided landing strategy in which the divergence of optical flow is regulate ...

MAVRL

Learn to Fly in Cluttered Environments With Varying Speed

Autonomous flight in unknown, cluttered environments is still a major challenge in robotics. Existing obstacle avoidance algorithms typically adopt a fixed flight velocity, overlooking the crucial balance between safety and agility. We propose a reinforcement learning algorithm t ...
Accurate trajectory tracking with quadrotors is a challenging task that requires a trade-off between accuracy and complexity to run onboard. Stateof- the-art adaptive controllers achieve impressive trajectory tracking results with slight performance degradation in varying winds o ...
This Review discusses the main results obtained in training end-to-end neural architectures for guidance and control of interplanetary transfers, planetary landings, and close-proximity operations, highlighting the successful learning of optimality principles by the underlying ne ...
ROVIO is one of the state-of-the-art monocular visual inertial odometry algorithms. It uses an Iterative Extended Kalman Filter (IEKF) to align visual features and update the vehicle state simultaneously by including the feature locations in the state vector of the IEKF. This alg ...

Editorial

Special Issue on Advancing Micro Air Vehicle Technologies: Selected Papers from IMAV 2022

Navigation is an essential capability for autonomous robots. In particular, visual navigation has been a major research topic in robotics because cameras are lightweight, power-efficient sensors that provide rich information on the environment. However, the main challenge of visu ...
Developing optimal controllers for aggressive high-speed quadcopter flight poses significant challenges in robotics. Recent trends in the field involve utilizing neural network controllers trained through supervised or reinforcement learning. However, the sim-to-real transfer int ...
Aggressive time-optimal control of quadcopters poses a significant challenge in the field of robotics. The state-of-the-art approach leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to train optimal neural policies. However, a critical hurdle is the sim-to-real gap, often addressed by emplo ...
Obstacle avoidance is an important capability for flying robots. But for robots with limited resources, such as small drones this becomes particularly challenging. Bug algorithms have been proposed to solve path planning with only minimal resources. And stereo vision provides a r ...

AvoidBench

A high-fidelity vision-based obstacle avoidance benchmarking suite for multi-rotors

Obstacle avoidance is an essential topic in the field of autonomous drone research. When choosing an avoidance algorithm, many different options are available, each with their advantages and disadvantages. As there is currently no consensus on testing methods, it is quite challen ...
Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) offers multiple advantages over Kalman Filters when it comes to the localization of drones. However, due to the high computational cost, they can not be used on Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) with limited computational power. We have previously shown, t ...
Event cameras have recently gained significant traction since they open up new avenues for low-latency and low-power solutions to complex computer vision problems. To unlock these solutions, it is necessary to develop algorithms that can leverage the unique nature of event data. ...
Neuromorphic processing promises high energy efficiency and rapid response rates, making it an ideal candidate for achieving autonomous flight of resource-constrained robots. It can be especially beneficial for complex neural networks as are used for high-level visual perception. ...
Attitude control is an essential flight capability. Whereas flying robots commonly rely on accelerometers1 for estimating attitude, flying insects lack an unambiguous sense of gravity2,3. Despite the established role of several sense organs in attitude stabi ...
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 ...
This paper discusses a low-cost, open-source and open-hardware design and performance evaluation of a low-speed, multi-fan wind system dedicated to micro air vehicle (MAV) testing. In addition, a set of experiments with a flapping wing MAV and rotorcraft is presented, demonstrati ...
Flyers in nature equip different airflow sensing mechanisms to navigate through wind disturbances with remarkable flight stability. Embracing bio-inspiration, airflow sensing with conventional sensors has long been utilized in flight control for larger micro air vehicles (MAVs). ...
ROVIO is one of the state-of-the-art mono visual inertial odometry algorithms. It uses an Iterative Extended Kalman Filter (IEKF) to align features and update the vehicle state simultaneously by including the feature locations in the state vector of the IEKF. This algorithm is si ...