Search Results for « Autonomous Drone Racing »

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.

Over the last decade, the use of autonomous drone systems for surveying, search and rescue, or last-mile delivery has increased exponentially. With the rise of these applications comes the need for highly robust, safety-critical algorithms that can operate drones in complex and uncertain environments. Additionally, flying fast enables drones to cover more ground, increasing productivity and further strengthening their use case. One proxy for developing algorithms used in high-speed navigation is the task of autonomous drone racing, where researchers program drones to fly through a sequence of gates and avoid obstacles as quickly as possible using onboard sensors and limited computational power. Speeds and accelerations exceed over 80 kph and 4 g, respectively, raising significant challenges across perception, planning, control, and state estimation. To achieve maximum performance, systems require real-time algorithms that are robust to motion blur, high dynamic range, model uncertainties, aerodynamic disturbances, and often unpredictable opponents. This survey covers the progression of autonomous drone racing across model-based and learning-based approaches. We provide an overview of the field, its evolution over the years, and conclude with the biggest challenges and open questions to be faced in the future.

A fundamental aspect of racing is overtaking other race cars. Whereas previous research on autonomous racing has majorly focused on lap-time optimization, here, we propose a method to plan overtaking maneuvers in autonomous racing. A Gaussian process is used to learn the behavior of the leading vehicle. Based on the outputs of the Gaussian process, a stochastic Model Predictive Control algorithm plans optimistic trajectories, such that the controlled autonomous race car is able to overtake the leading vehicle. The proposed method is tested in a simple simulation scenario.

Resolving edge-cases in autonomous driving, head-to-head autonomous racing is getting a lot of attention from the industry and academia. In this study, we propose a game-theoretic model predictive control (MPC) approach for head-to-head autonomous racing and data-driven model identification method. For the practical estimation of nonlinear model parameters, we adopted the hyperband algorithm, which is used for neural model training in machine learning. The proposed controller comprises three modules: 1) game-based opponents' trajectory predictor, 2) high-level race strategy planner, and 3) MPC-based low-level controller. The game-based predictor was designed to predict the future trajectories of competitors. Based on the prediction results, the high-level race strategy planner plans several behaviors to respond to various race circumstances. Finally, the MPC-based controller computes the optimal control commands to follow the trajectories. The proposed approach was validated under various racing circumstances in an official simulator of the Indy Autonomous Challenge. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively overtake competitors, while driving through the track as quickly as possible without collisions.

Autonomous racing is becoming popular for academic and industry researchers as a test for general autonomous driving by pushing perception, planning, and control algorithms to their limits. While traditional control methods such as MPC are capable of generating an optimal control sequence at the edge of the vehicles physical controllability, these methods are sensitive to the accuracy of the modeling parameters. This paper presents TC-Driver, a RL approach for robust control in autonomous racing. In particular, the TC-Driver agent is conditioned by a trajectory generated by any arbitrary traditional high-level planner. The proposed TC-Driver addresses the tire parameter modeling inaccuracies by exploiting the heuristic nature of RL while leveraging the reliability of traditional planning methods in a hierarchical control structure. We train the agent under varying tire conditions, allowing it to generalize to different model parameters, aiming to increase the racing capabilities of the system in practice. The proposed RL method outperforms a non-learning-based MPC with a 2.7 lower crash ratio in a model mismatch setting, underlining robustness to parameter discrepancies. In addition, the average RL inference duration is 0.25 ms compared to the average MPC solving time of 11.5 ms, yielding a nearly 40-fold speedup, allowing for complex control deployment in computationally constrained devices. Lastly, we show that the frequently utilized end-to-end RL architecture, as a control policy directly learned from sensory input, is not well suited to model mismatch robustness nor track generalization. Our realistic simulations show that TC-Driver achieves a 6.7 and 3-fold lower crash ratio under model mismatch and track generalization settings, while simultaneously achieving lower lap times than an end-to-end approach, demonstrating the viability of TC-driver to robust autonomous racing.

In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the timeoptimal trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming perfect knowledge of the waypoints to pass in advance. The resulting solution is either highly specialized for a single-track layout, or suboptimal due to simplifying assumptions about the platform dynamics. In this work, a new approach to near-time-optimal trajectory generation for quadrotors is presented. Leveraging deep reinforcement learning and relative gate observations, our approach can compute near-time-optimal trajectories and adapt the trajectory to environment changes. Our method exhibits computational advantages over approaches based on trajectory optimization for non-trivial track configurations. The proposed approach is evaluated on a set of race tracks in simulation and the real world, achieving speeds of up to 60kmh−1with a physical quadrotor.

This research contributes to the security design of an advanced smart drone swarm network based on a variant of the Blockchain Governance Game (BGG), which is the theoretical game model to predict the moments of security actions before attacks, and the Strategic Alliance for Blockchain Governance Game (SABGG), which is one of the BGG variants which has been adapted to construct the best strategies to take preliminary actions based on strategic alliance for protecting smart drones in a blockchain-based swarm network. Smart drones are artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled drones which are capable of being operated autonomously without having any command center. Analytically tractable solutions from the SABGG allow us to estimate the moments of taking preliminary actions by delivering the optimal accountability of drones for preventing attacks. This advanced secured swarm network within AI-enabled drones is designed by adapting the SABGG model. This research helps users to develop a new network-architecture-level security of a smart drone swarm which is based on a decentralized network.

Autonomous Drone Racing (ADR) was first proposed in IROS 2016. It called for the development of an autonomous drone capable of beating a human in a drone race. After almost five years, several teams have proposed different solutions with a common pipeline: gate detection; drone localization; and stable flight control. Recently, Deep Learning (DL) has been used for gate detection and localization of the drone regarding the gate. However, recent competitions such as the Game of Drones, held at NeurIPS 2019, called for solutions where DL played a more significant role. Motivated by the latter, in this work, we propose a CNN approach called DeepPilot that takes camera images as input and predicts flight commands as output. These flight commands represent: the angular position of the drone’s body frame in the roll and pitch angles, thus producing translation motion in those angles; rotational speed in the yaw angle; and vertical speed referred as altitude h. Values for these 4 flight commands, predicted by DeepPilot, are passed to the drone’s inner controller, thus enabling the drone to navigate autonomously through the gates in the racetrack. For this, we assume that the next gate becomes visible immediately after the current gate has been crossed. We present evaluations in simulated racetrack environments where DeepPilot is run several times successfully to prove repeatability. In average, DeepPilot runs at 25 frames per second (fps). We also present a thorough evaluation of what we called a temporal approach, which consists of creating a mosaic image, with consecutive camera frames, that is passed as input to the DeepPilot. We argue that this helps to learn the drone’s motion trend regarding the gate, thus acting as a local memory that leverages the prediction of the flight commands. Our results indicate that this purely DL-based artificial pilot is feasible to be used for the ADR challenge.

We leverage blockchain technology for drone node authentication in internet of drone things (IoDT). During the authentication procedure, the credentials of drone nodes are examined to remove malicious nodes from the system. In IoDT, drones are responsible for gathering data and transmitting it to cluster heads (CHs) for further processing. The CH collects and organizes data. Due to computational load, their energy levels rapidly deplete. To overcome this problem, we present a low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (R2D) protocol based on distance, degree, and residual energy. R2D is used to replace CHs with normal nodes based on the biggest residual energy, the degree, and the shortest distance from BS. The cost of keeping a big volume of data on the blockchain is high. We employ the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), to address this issue. Moreover, IPFS protects user data using the industry-standard encryption technique AES-128. This standard compares well to other current encryption methods. Using a consensus mechanism based on proof of work requires a high amount of computing resources for transaction verification. The suggested approach leverages a consensus mechanism known as proof of authority (PoA) to address this problem . The results of the simulations indicate that the suggested system model functions effectively and efficiently. A formal security analysis is conducted to assess the smart contract's resistance to attacks.