Learning Long-Horizon Predictions for Quadrotor Dynamics

Accurate modeling of system dynamics is crucial for achieving high-performance planning and control of robotic systems. Although existing data-driven approaches represent a promising approach for modeling dynamics, their accuracy is limited to a short prediction horizon, overlooking the impact of compounding prediction errors over longer prediction horizons. Strategies to mitigate these cumulative errors remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we study the key design choices for efficiently learning long-horizon prediction dynamics for quadrotors. Specifically, we analyze the impact of multiple architectures, historical data, and multi-step loss formulation. We show that sequential modeling techniques showcase their advantage in minimizing compounding errors compared to other types of solutions. Furthermore, we propose a novel decoupled dynamics learning approach, which further simplifies the learning process while also enhancing the approach modularity. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on real-world quadrotor data demonstrate the versatility and precision of the proposed approach. Our outcomes offer several insights and methodologies for enhancing long-term predictive accuracy of learned quadrotor dynamics for planning and control.

STHN: Deep Homography Estimation for UAV Thermal Geo-localization with Satellite Imagery

Accurate geo-localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is crucial for a variety of outdoor applications including search and rescue operations, power line inspections, and environmental monitoring. The vulnerability of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals to interference and spoofing necessitates the development of additional robust localization methods for autonomous navigation. Visual Geo-localization (VG), leveraging onboard cameras and reference satellite maps, offers a promising solution for absolute localization. Specifically, Thermal Geo-localization (TG), which relies on image-based matching between thermal imagery with satellite databases, stands out by utilizing infrared cameras for effective night-time localization. However, the efficiency and effectiveness of current TG approaches, are hindered by dense sampling on satellite maps and geometric noises in thermal query images. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we introduce STHN, a novel UAV thermal geo-localization approach that employs a coarse-to-fine deep homography estimation method. This method attains reliable thermal geo-localization within a 512-meter radius of the UAV's last known location even with a challenging 11% overlap between satellite and thermal images, despite the presence of indistinct textures in thermal imagery and self-similar patterns in both spectra. Our research significantly enhances UAV thermal geo-localization performance and robustness against the impacts of geometric noises under low-visibility conditions in the wild. The code will be made publicly available.

CoPeD-Advancing Multi-Robot Collaborative Perception: A Comprehensive Dataset in Real-World Environments

In the past decade, although single-robot perception has made significant advancements, the exploration of multi-robot collaborative perception remains largely unexplored. This involves fusing compressed, intermittent, limited, heterogeneous, and asynchronous environmental information across multiple robots to enhance overall perception, despite challenges like sensor noise, occlusions, and sensor failures. One major hurdle has been the lack of real-world datasets. This paper presents a pioneering and comprehensive real-world multi-robot collaborative perception dataset to boost research in this area. Our dataset leverages the untapped potential of air-ground robot collaboration featuring distinct spatial viewpoints, complementary robot mobilities, coverage ranges, and sensor modalities. It features raw sensor inputs, pose estimation, and optional high-level perception annotation, thus accommodating diverse research interests. Compared to existing datasets predominantly designed for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), our setup ensures a diverse range and adequate overlap of sensor views to facilitate the study of multi-robot collaborative perception algorithms. We demonstrate the value of this dataset qualitatively through multiple collaborative perception tasks. We believe this work will unlock the potential research of high-level scene understanding through multi-modal collaborative perception in multi-robot settings.

Data-Driven System Identification of Quadrotors Subject to Motor Delays

Recently non-linear control methods like Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have attracted increased interest in the quadrotor control community. In contrast to classic control methods like cascaded PID controllers, MPC and RL heavily rely on an accurate model of the system dynamics. The process of quadrotor system identification is notoriously tedious and is often pursued with additional equipment like a thrust stand. Furthermore, low-level details like motor delays which are crucial for accurate end-to-end control are often neglected. In this work, we introduce a data-driven method to identify a quadrotor's inertia parameters, thrust curves, torque coefficients, and first-order motor delay purely based on proprioceptive data. The estimation of the motor delay is particularly challenging as usually, the RPMs can not be measured. We derive a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP)-based method to estimate the latent time constant. Our approach only requires about a minute of flying data that can be collected without any additional equipment and usually consists of three simple maneuvers. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of our method to accurately recover the parameters of multiple quadrotors. It also facilitates the deployment of RL-based, end-to-end quadrotor control of a large quadrotor under harsh, outdoor conditions.

Experimental System Design of an Active Fault-Tolerant Quadrotor

Quadrotors have gained popularity over the last decade, aiding humans in complex tasks such as search and rescue, mapping and exploration. Despite their mechanical simplicity and versatility compared to other types of aerial vehicles, they remain vulnerable to rotor failures. In this paper, we propose an algorithmic and mechanical approach to addressing the quadrotor fault-tolerant problem in case of rotor failures. First, we present a fault-tolerant detection and control scheme that includes various attitude error metrics. The scheme transitions to a fault-tolerant control mode by surrendering the yaw control. Subsequently, to ensure compatibility with platform sensing constraints, we investigate the relationship between variations in robot rotational drag, achieved through a modular mechanical design appendage, resulting in yaw rates within sensor limits. This analysis offers a platform-agnostic framework for designing more reliable and robust quadrotors in the event of rotor failures. Extensive experimental results validate the proposed approach providing insights into successfully designing a cost-effective quadrotor capable of fault-tolerant control. The overall design enhances safety in scenarios of faulty rotors, without the need for additional sensors or computational resources.

Spatial Assisted Human-Drone Collaborative Navigation and Interaction through Immersive Mixed Reality

Aerial robots have the potential to play a crucial role in assisting humans with complex and dangerous tasks. Nevertheless, the future industry demands innovative solutions to streamline the interaction process between humans and drones to enable seamless collaboration and efficient co-working. In this paper, we present a novel tele-immersive framework that promotes cognitive and physical collaboration between humans and robots through Mixed Reality (MR). This framework incorporates a novel bi-directional spatial awareness and a multi-modal virtual-physical interaction approaches. The former seamlessly integrates the physical and virtual worlds, offering bidirectional egocentric and exocentric environmental representations. The latter, leveraging the proposed spatial representation, further enhances the collaboration combining a robot planning algorithm for obstacle avoidance with a variable admittance control. This allows users to issue commands based on virtual forces while maintaining compatibility with the environment map. We validate the proposed approach by performing several collaborative planning and exploration tasks involving a drone and an user equipped with a MR headset.

Exploring Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Target Tracking using Micro Aerial Vehicles

The capability to autonomously track a non-cooperative target is a key technological requirement for micro aerial vehicles. In this paper, we propose an output feedback control scheme based on deep reinforcement learning for controlling a micro aerial vehicle to persistently track a flying target while maintaining visual contact. The proposed method leverages relative position data for control, relaxing the assumption of having access to full state information which is typical of related approaches in literature. Moreover, we exploit classical robustness indicators in the learning process through domain randomization to increase the robustness of the learned policy. Experimental results validate the proposed approach for target tracking, demonstrating high performance and robustness with respect to mass mismatches and control delays. The resulting nonlinear controller significantly outperforms a standard model-based design in numerous off-nominal scenarios.

Learning to Fly in Seconds

Learning-based methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL), hold great promise for streamlining deployment, enhancing performance, and achieving generalization in the control of autonomous multirotor aerial vehicles. Deep RL has been able to control complex systems with impressive fidelity and agility in simulation but the simulation-to-reality transfer often brings a hard-to-bridge reality gap. Moreover, RL is commonly plagued by prohibitively long training times. In this work, we propose a novel asymmetric actor-critic-based architecture coupled with a highly reliable RL-based training paradigm for end-to-end quadrotor control. We show how curriculum learning and a highly optimized simulator enhance sample complexity and lead to fast training times. To precisely discuss the challenges related to low-level/end-to-end multirotor control, we also introduce a taxonomy that classifies the existing levels of control abstractions as well as non-linearities and domain parameters. Our framework enables Simulation-to-Reality (Sim2Real) transfer for direct RPM control after only 18 seconds of training on a consumer-grade laptop as well as its deployment on microcontrollers to control a multirotor under real-time guarantees. Finally, our solution exhibits competitive performance in trajectory tracking, as demonstrated through various experimental comparisons with existing state-of-the-art control solutions using a real Crazyflie nano quadrotor. We open source the code including a very fast multirotor dynamics simulator that can simulate about 5 months of flight per second on a laptop GPU. The fast training times and deployment to a cheap, off-the-shelf quadrotor lower the barriers to entry and help democratize the research and development of these systems.

Visual Environment Assessment for Safe Autonomous Quadrotor Landing

Autonomous identification and evaluation of safe landing zones are of paramount importance for ensuring the safety and effectiveness of aerial robots in the event of system failures, low battery, or the successful completion of specific tasks. In this paper, we present a novel approach for detection and assessment of potential landing sites for safe quadrotor landing. Our solution efficiently integrates 2D and 3D environmental information, eliminating the need for external aids such as GPS and computationally intensive elevation maps. The proposed pipeline combines semantic data derived from a Neural Network (NN), to extract environmental features, with geometric data obtained from a disparity map, to extract critical geometric attributes such as slope, flatness, and roughness. We define several cost metrics based on these attributes to evaluate safety, stability, and suitability of regions in the environments and identify the most suitable landing area. Our approach runs in real-time on quadrotors equipped with limited computational capabilities. Experimental results conducted in diverse environments demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively assess and identify suitable landing areas, enabling the safe and autonomous landing of a quadrotor.

From Propeller Damage Estimation and Adaptation to Fault Tolerant Control: Enhancing Quadrotor Resilience

Aerial robots are required to remain operational even in the event of system disturbances, damages, or failures to ensure resilient and robust task completion and safety. One common failure case is propeller damage, which presents a significant challenge in both quantification and compensation. We propose a novel adaptive control scheme capable of detecting and compensating for multi-rotor propeller damages, ensuring safe and robust flight performances. Our control scheme includes an L1 adaptive controller for damage inference and compensation of single or dual propellers, with the capability to seamlessly transition to a fault-tolerant solution in case the damage becomes severe. We experimentally identify the conditions under which the L1 adaptive solution remains preferable over a fault-tolerant alternative. Experimental results validate the proposed approach, demonstrating its effectiveness in running the adaptive strategy in real time on a quadrotor even in case of damage to multiple propellers.