11 papers
MonoRace: Winning Champion-Level Drone Racing with Robust Monocular AI
Stavrow A. Bahnam, Robin Ferede, Till M. Blaha +6
Autonomous drone racing represents a major frontier in robotics research. It requires an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can run on board light-weight flying robots under tight r…
Breaking the Circle: An Autonomous Control-Switching Strategy for Stable Orographic Soaring in MAVs
Sunyou Hwang, Christophe De Wagter, Bart Remes +1
Orographic soaring can significantly extend the endurance of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), but circling behavior, arising from control conflicts between the longitudinal and vertic…
Artificial Microsaccade Compensation: Stable Vision for an Ornithopter
Levi Burner, Guido de Croon, Yiannis Aloimonos
Animals with foveated vision, including humans, experience microsaccades, small, rapid eye movements that they are not aware of. Inspired by this phenomenon, we develop a method fo…
Adaptive Surrogate Gradients for Sequential Reinforcement Learning in Spiking Neural Networks
Korneel Van den Berghe, Stein Stroobants, Vijay Janapa Reddi +1
Neuromorphic computing systems are set to revolutionize energy-constrained robotics by achieving orders-of-magnitude efficiency gains, while enabling native temporal processing. Sp…
SkyDreamer: Interpretable End-to-End Vision-Based Drone Racing with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Aderik Verraest, Stavrow Bahnam, Robin Ferede +2
Autonomous drone racing (ADR) systems have recently achieved champion-level performance, yet remain highly specific to drone racing. While end-to-end vision-based methods promise b…
Whisker-based Tactile Flight for Tiny Drones
Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon, Salua Hamaza
Tiny flying robots hold great potential for search-and-rescue, safety inspections, and environmental monitoring, but their small size limits conventional sensing-especially with po…