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AlphaPilot: autonomous drone racing


Foehn, Philipp; Brescianini, Dario; Kaufmann, Elia; Cieslewski, Titus; Gehrig, Mathias; Muglikar, Manasi; Scaramuzza, Davide (2022). AlphaPilot: autonomous drone racing. Autonomous Robots, 46(1):307-320.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first autonomous drone racing world championship: the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge. Contrary to traditional drone racing systems, which only detect the next gate, our approach makes use of any visible gate and takes advantage of multiple, simultaneous gate detections to compensate for drift in the state estimate and build a global map of the gates. The global map and drift-compensated state estimate allow the drone to navigate through the race course even when the gates are not immediately visible and further enable to plan a near time-optimal path through the race course in real time based on approximate drone dynamics. The proposed system has been demonstrated to successfully guide the drone through tight race courses reaching speeds up to 8m/s and ranked second at the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first autonomous drone racing world championship: the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge. Contrary to traditional drone racing systems, which only detect the next gate, our approach makes use of any visible gate and takes advantage of multiple, simultaneous gate detections to compensate for drift in the state estimate and build a global map of the gates. The global map and drift-compensated state estimate allow the drone to navigate through the race course even when the gates are not immediately visible and further enable to plan a near time-optimal path through the race course in real time based on approximate drone dynamics. The proposed system has been demonstrated to successfully guide the drone through tight race courses reaching speeds up to 8m/s and ranked second at the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.

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Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:03 Faculty of Economics > Department of Informatics
Dewey Decimal Classification:000 Computer science, knowledge & systems
Scopus Subject Areas:Physical Sciences > Artificial Intelligence
Language:English
Date:2022
Deposited On:17 Feb 2022 09:47
Last Modified:27 Sep 2022 11:47
Publisher:Springer
ISSN:0929-5593
OA Status:Hybrid
Free access at:Publisher DOI. An embargo period may apply.
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-021-10011-y
Related URLs:https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/193886/
Other Identification Number:merlin-id:22171
  • Content: Published Version
  • Licence: Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)