No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we present an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) landing system based on visual navigation. We design the landmark as a topological pattern in order to enable the UAV to distinguish the landmark from the environment easily. In addition, a dynamic thresholding method is developed for image binarization to improve detection efficiency. The relative distance in the horizontal plane is calculated according to effective image information, and the relative height is obtained using a linear interpolation method. The landing experiments are performed on a static and a moving platform, respectively. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed landing system performs robustly and accurately.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions. However, these UAVs have to be able to autonomously navigate in disaster struck environments and land on debris piles in order to accurately locate the survivors. This problem is extremely challenging as pre-existing maps cannot be leveraged for navigation due to structural changes that may have occurred. Furthermore, existing landing site detection algorithms are not suitable to identify safe landing regions on debris piles. In this work, we present a computationally efficient system for autonomous UAV navigation and landing that does not require any prior knowledge about the environment. We propose a novel landing site detection algorithm that computes costmaps based on several hazard factors including terrain flatness, steepness, depth accuracy, and energy consumption information. We also introduce a first-of-a-kind synthetic dataset of over 1.2 million images of collapsed buildings with groundtruth depth, surface normals, semantics and camera pose information. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system using experiments from a city scale hyperrealistic simulation environment and in real-world scenarios with collapsed buildings.
We present a method to autonomously land an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on a moving vehicle with a circular (or elliptical) pattern on the top. A visual servoing controller approaches the ground vehicle using velocity commands calculated directly in image space. The control laws generate velocity commands in all three dimensions, eliminating the need for a separate height controller. The method has shown the ability to approach and land on the moving deck in simulation, indoor and outdoor environments, and compared to the other available methods, it has provided the fastest landing approach. It does not rely on additional external setup, such as RTK, motion capture system, ground station, offboard processing, or communication with the vehicle, and it requires only a minimal set of hardware and localization sensors. The videos and source codes can be accessed from http://theairlab.org/landing-on-vehicle.
Selecting safe landing sites in non-cooperative environments is a key step towards the full autonomy of UAVs. However, the existing methods have the common problems of poor generalization ability and robustness. Their performance in unknown environments is significantly degraded and the error cannot be self-detected and corrected. In this paper, we construct a UAV system equipped with low-cost LiDAR and binocular cameras to realize autonomous landing in non-cooperative environments by detecting the flat and safe ground area. Taking advantage of the non-repetitive scanning and high FOV coverage characteristics of LiDAR, we come up with a dynamic time depth completion algorithm. In conjunction with the proposed self-evaluation method of the depth map, our model can dynamically select the LiDAR accumulation time at the inference phase to ensure an accurate prediction result. Based on the depth map, the high-level terrain information such as slope, roughness, and the size of the safe area are derived. We have conducted extensive autonomous landing experiments in a variety of familiar or completely unknown environments, verifying that our model can adaptively balance the accuracy and speed, and the UAV can robustly select a safe landing site.
Mobile robot navigation is typically regarded as a geometric problem, in which the robots objective is to perceive the geometry of the environment in order to plan collision-free paths towards a desired goal. However, a purely geometric view of the world can can be insufficient for many navigation problems. For example, a robot navigating based on geometry may avoid a field of tall grass because it believes it is untraversable, and will therefore fail to reach its desired goal. In this work, we investigate how to move beyond these purely geometric-based approaches using a method that learns about physical navigational affordances from experience. Our approach, which we call BADGR, is an end-to-end learning-based mobile robot navigation system that can be trained with self-supervised off-policy data gathered in real-world environments, without any simulation or human supervision. BADGR can navigate in real-world urban and off-road environments with geometrically distracting obstacles. It can also incorporate terrain preferences, generalize to novel environments, and continue to improve autonomously by gathering more data. Videos, code, and other supplemental material are available on our website https://sites.google.com/view/badgr
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions. However, these UAVs have to be able to autonomously land on debris piles in order to accurately locate the survivors. This problem is extremely challenging as the structure of these debris piles is often unknown and no prior knowledge can be leveraged. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient system that is able to reliably identify safe landing sites and autonomously perform the landing maneuver. Specifically, our algorithm computes costmaps based on several hazard factors including terrain flatness, steepness, depth accuracy and energy consumption information. We first estimate dense candidate landing sites from the resulting costmap and then employ clustering to group neighboring sites into a safe landing region. Finally, a minimum-jerk trajectory is computed for landing considering the surrounding obstacles and the UAV dynamics. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system using experiments from a city scale hyperrealistic simulation environment and in real-world scenarios with collapsed buildings.