Survivors stranded during floods tend to seek refuge on dry land. It is important to search for these survivors and help them reach safety as quickly as possible. The terrain in such situations however, is heavily damaged and restricts the movement of emergency personnel towards these survivors. Therefore, it is advantageous to utilize Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cooperation with on-ground first responders to aid search and rescue efforts. In this article we demonstrate an implementation and improvement of the weight-based path planning algorithm using an off-the-shelf UAV. The coordinates of the survivor and their heading is reported by an on-ground observer to the UAV to generate a weighted map of the surroundings for exploration. Each coordinate in the map is assigned a weight which dictates the priority of exploration. These waypoints are then sorted on the basis of their weights to arrive at an ordered list for exploration by the UAV. We developed the model in MATLAB, followed by prototyping on Robot Operating System (ROS) using a 3DR Iris quadcopter. We tested the model on an off-the-shelf UAV by utilizing the MAVROS and MAVLINK capabilities of ROS. During the implementation of the algorithm on the UAV, several additional factors such as unreliable GPS signals and limited field of view which could effect the performance of the model were in effect, despite which the algorithm performed fairly well. We compared our model with conventional algorithms described in the literature, and showed that our implementation outperforms them.
In this paper, we present a control system that allows a drone to fly autonomously through a series of gates marked with ArUco tags. A simple and low-cost DJI Tello EDU quad-rotor platform was used. Based on the API provided by the manufacturer, we have created a Python application that enables the communication with the drone over WiFi, realises drone positioning based on visual feedback, and generates control. Two control strategies were proposed, compared, and critically analysed. In addition, the accuracy of the positioning method used was measured. The application was evaluated on a lapto…
We demonstrate how efficient autonomous drone swarms can be in detecting and tracking occluded targets in densely forested areas, such as lost people during search and rescue missions. Exploration and optimization of local viewing conditions, such as occlusion density and target view obliqueness, provide much faster and much more reliable results than previous, blind sampling strategies that are based on pre-defined waypoints. An adapted real-time particle swarm optimization and a new objective function are presented that are able to deal with dynamic and highly random through-foliage conditio…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）
To be successful in multi-player drone racing, a player must not only follow the race track in an optimal way, but also compete with other drones through strategic blocking, faking, and opportunistic passing while avoiding collisions. Since unveiling one's own strategy to the adversaries is not desirable, this requires each player to independently predict the other players' future actions. Nash equilibria are a powerful tool to model this and similar multi-agent coordination problems in which the absence of communication impedes full coordination between the agents. In this paper, we propose a…
Real-Time Sense and Detect of Drones Using Deep Learning and Airborne LiDAR
Drone Systems Lab, School of Computing, Engineering, and Physical Sciences, University of the West of Scotland（无人机系统实验室，计算、工程与物理科学学院，西方苏格兰大学）；Centre for Robotics & Intelligent Systems, Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering, University of Limerick（机器人与智能系统中心，电子与计算机工程系，利默里克大学）；Hamburg Port Authority（汉堡港口管理局）
FleetScape: A Mixed Reality Sandtable for Spatial Supervision and Control of Scalable Drone Fleets
University of Toulouse, Fédération ENAC ISAE-SUPAERO ONERA（图卢兹大学、法国航空航天学校联合会、高等航空航天学院、法国航空航天研究院）；CNRS, IPAL（法国国家科学研究中心、IPAL机构）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；National University of Singapore, Augmented Human Lab（新加坡国立大学增强人类实验室）；National University of Singapore, School of Computing（新加坡国立大学计算机学院）
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd.（雅马哈发动机株式会社）
Autonomous aerial cinematography has the potential to enable automatic capture of aesthetically pleasing videos without requiring human intervention, empowering individuals with the capability of high-end film studios. Current approaches either only handle off-line trajectory generation, or offer strategies that reason over short time horizons and simplistic representations for obstacles, which result in jerky movement and low real-life applicability. In this work we develop a method for aerial filming that is able to trade off shot smoothness, occlusion, and cinematography guidelines in a pri…
University of ElectroCommunications, Tokyo（东京电机大学）
For the human operator, it is often easier and faster to catch a small size quadrotor right in the midair instead of landing it on a surface. However, interaction strategies for such cases have not yet been considered properly, especially when more than one drone has to be landed at the same time. In this paper, we propose a novel interaction strategy to land multiple robots on the human hands using vibrotactile feedback. We developed a wearable tactile display that is activated by the intensity of light emitted from an LED ring on the bottom of the quadcopter. We conducted experiments, where …
Learning on the Fly: Replay-Based Continual Object Perception for Indoor Drones
National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest, Romania（罗马尼亚布加勒斯特多项技术大学）；Institute of Mathematics ``Simion Stoilow'' of the Romanian Academy, Romania（罗马尼亚科学院模拟昂斯数学研究所）；NORCE Norwegian Research Center, Norway（挪威NORCE研究中心）
Towards automatic smoke detector inspection: Recognition of the smoke detectors in industrial facilities and preparation for future drone integration
Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）；VSB - Technical University of Ostrava（俄斯特拉发技术大学）；University of Ostrava（俄斯特拉发大学）；Mendel University in Brno（布尔诺孟德尔大学）
Safety in autonomous systems has been mostly studied from a human-centered perspective. Besides the loads they may carry, autonomous systems are also valuable property, and self-preservation mechanisms are needed to protect them in the presence of external threats, including malicious robots and antagonistic humans. We present a biologically inspired risk-based triggering mechanism to initiate self-preservation strategies. This mechanism considers environmental and internal system factors to measure the overall risk at any moment in time, to decide whether behaviours such as fleeing or hiding …
organization= Advanced Research Lab for Control；Agricultural Robotics (Sharif AgRoLab) Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology , city= Tehran , country= Iran；Robotics Research Group Saxion University of Applied Science , city= Enschede , country= Netherlands
DRAL: Deep Reinforcement Adaptive Learning for Multi-UAVs Navigation in Unknown Indoor Environment
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学欧文分校）；George Washington University（乔治·华盛顿大学）；Beijing Sineva Robot Technology Co., Ltd（北京思知机器人科技有限公司）；University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Santa Clara University（圣克拉拉大学）；Mangosuthu University of Technology（曼戈苏图科技大学）
University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）
Over the past few years, the use of swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in monitoring and remote area surveillance applications has become widespread thanks to the price reduction and the increased capabilities of drones. The drones in the swarm need to cooperatively explore an unknown area, in order to identify and monitor interesting targets, while minimizing their movements. In this work, we propose a distributed Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach that scales to larger swarms without modifications. The proposed framework relies on the possibility for the UAVs to exchange some inform…
New York University, Tandon School of Engineering（纽约大学坦登工程学院）；Technology Innovation Institute（技术创新研究院）
In this paper, we address the vision-based detection and tracking problems of multiple aerial vehicles using a single camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) as well as the corresponding perception consensus problem (i.e., uniqueness and identical IDs across all observing agents). We design several vision-based decentralized Bayesian multi-tracking filtering strategies to resolve the association between the incoming unsorted measurements obtained by a visual detector algorithm and the tracked agents. We compare their accuracy in different operating conditions as well as their scalability ac…
Optimal transport (OT) is a framework that can guide the design of efficient resource allocation strategies in a network of multiple sources and targets. This paper applies discrete OT to a swarm of UAVs in a novel way to achieve appropriate task allocation and execution. Drone swarm deployments already operate in multiple domains where sensors are used to gain knowledge of an environment [1]. Use cases such as, chemical and radiation detection, and thermal and RGB imaging create a specific need for an algorithm that considers parameters on both the UAV and waypoint side and allows for updatin…
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay（巴黎-萨克雷高等师范学校）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎-萨克雷大学）
The control of collective robotic systems, such as drone swarms, is often delegated to autonomous navigation algorithms due to their high dimensionality. However, like other robotic entities, drone swarms can still benefit from being teleoperated by human operators, whose perception and decision-making capabilities are still out of the reach of autonomous systems. Drone swarm teleoperation is only at its dawn, and a standard human-swarm interface (HRI) is missing to date. In this study, we analyzed the spontaneous interaction strategies of naive users with a swarm of drones. We implemented a m…
Human-Centric Aware UAV Trajectory Planning in Search and Rescue Missions Employing Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning with AHP and Similarity-Based Experience Replay
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学安全、可靠性与信任跨学科中心）；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）
