DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

Deep Drone Racing: Learning Agile Flight in Dynamic Environments

06/22/2018
by   Elia Kaufmann, et al.
0

Autonomous agile flight brings up fundamental challenges in robotics, such as coping with unreliable state estimation, reacting optimally to dynamically changing environments, and coupling perception and action in real time under severe resource constraints. In this paper, we consider these challenges in the context of autonomous, vision-based drone racing in dynamic environments. Our approach combines a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a state-of-the-art path-planning and control system. The CNN directly maps raw images into a robust representation in the form of a waypoint and desired speed. This information is then used by the planner to generate a short, minimum-jerk trajectory segment and corresponding motor commands to reach the desired goal. We demonstrate our method in autonomous agile flight scenarios, in which a vision-based quadrotor traverses drone-racing tracks with possibly moving gates. Our method does not require any explicit map of the environment and runs fully onboard. We extensively test the precision and robustness of the approach in simulation and in the physical world. We also evaluate our method against state-of-the-art navigation approaches and professional human drone pilots.

READ FULL TEXT

page 2

page 5

page 13

05/21/2019

Deep Drone Racing: From Simulation to Reality with Domain Randomization

Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and oper...
10/26/2022

Learning Deep Sensorimotor Policies for Vision-based Autonomous Drone Racing

Autonomous drones can operate in remote and unstructured environments, e...
09/09/2020

Vision-Based Autonomous Drone Control using Supervised Learning in Simulation

Limited power and computational resources, absence of high-end sensor eq...
05/27/2021

Robust Navigation for Racing Drones based on Imitation Learning and Modularization

This paper presents a vision-based modularized drone racing navigation s...
07/28/2022

PencilNet: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer Learning for Robust Gate Perception in Autonomous Drone Racing

In autonomous and mobile robotics, one of the main challenges is the rob...
09/15/2021

Expertise Affects Drone Racing Performance

First-person view drone racing has become a popular televised sport. How...
10/15/2018

Beauty and the Beast: Optimal Methods Meet Learning for Drone Racing

Autonomous micro aerial vehicles still struggle with fast and agile mane...