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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title AlphaPilot: autonomous drone racing
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Philipp Foehn
  • Dario Brescianini
  • Elia Kaufmann
  • Titus Cieslewski
  • Mathias Gehrig
  • Manasi Muglikar
  • Davide Scaramuzza
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Autonomous Robots
Publisher Springer
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 0929-5593
Volume 46
Number 1
Page Range 307 - 320
Date 2022
Abstract Text 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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Digital Object Identifier 10.1007/s10514-021-10011-y
Other Identification Number merlin-id:22171
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