Prof. Fei Gao, ZJU

Talk title: “Swarm of Micro Robots Flying Out of Laboratory”

 

Multicopter plays a vital role in many areas such as geographic mapping, aerial filming, search and rescue, et al. In recent years, our community has witnessed huge development in autonomous navigation within structured and controlled built environments. Aerial robots, and their swarms, now are required not only to fly out of laboratory, but also to finish more complicated tasks. To this end, building smarter drones with sophisticated functionalities is an attractive research topic. In this talk, I will introduce some new methods of aerial robots developed in my group, which may evolve aerial robotics in three aspects: capability of cluttered environment navigation, extensibility to diverse task requirements, and coordination as a swarm without external facilities. Then, based on real-world requirements, some systematic solutions for formation flight in dense environments are presented, including the architecture, algorithms, engineering considerations. Finally, I will turn to some of our most recent research, on which we are working towards a perception-planning coupled, flexibly coordinated, and large-scale aerial swarm system.

Prof. Fu Zhang, HKU

Talk title: “UAV navigation and mapping using LiDAR sensors”

 

Over the last decades, small-size multi-copter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have received intensive research interests. These UAVs have shown promising potential for various applications, including aerial photography, farming, delivery, mapping, and surveying. However, for these applications to be successful, autonomous flights in unknown environments are necessary. In this talk, we will discuss our work on developing autonomous UAVs using lidar navigation. Specifically, we will explore recent advancements in lidar technologies and focus on navigation algorithms, including localization, mapping, planning, and control. We will showcase how lidar sensors can be utilized on small UAVs to enable complex navigation tasks, such as high-speed flight navigation, environment exploration, and estimation of agile UAV motion.   

Prof. Hyun Myung, KAIST

Talk title: “Autonomous robot navigation in rough terrains using spatial AI”

 

This talk introduces the latest development of spatial AI-based autonomous navigation technologies for autonomous vehicles such as mobile robots, legged robots, and drones. The actual cases developed by KAIST Urban Robotics Lab will be introduced. Specifically, we present various spatial AI frameworks for mobile robots, drones, and legged robots in rough terrains. The deep reinforcement learning-based blind locomotion technology called DreamWaQ will also be introduced.   

Dr. Peyman Moghadam, CSIRO

Talk title: “Long-Term Robot Learning in Natural Environments: Challenges and Opportunities”

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Prof. Marija Popovic, TU Delft

Talk title: “Adaptive environmental monitoring using UAVs”

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Prof. Timothy Barfoot, Univ. Toronto

Talk title: Taking a Hard Line: Robot Navigation When Lighting, Weather, and Geometry Won’t Cooperate

 

Bad weather, extreme lighting, long tunnels, and cluttered offroad terrain are just some examples of situations that can challenge our ability to accurately position an autonomous vehicle and perceive its local environment. I will provide a progress update on our long-term efforts to navigate in such difficult conditions. On the road, we are testing both lidar and radar-based localization in harsh weather conditions to understand the advantages of each. As part of this, we are exploring the use of Doppler lidar and Doppler radar to carry out egomotion estimation in geometrically degenerate situations including long tunnels. Offroad, we also using lidar and radar for long-term route following in rough terrain while avoiding obstacles. Finally, on the theory side, we have been investigating so-called certifiably optimal algorithms to verify our backend optimization algorithms converge to correct solutions despite poor initial guesses. We hope this work, alongside the contributions of many others, will help move the field down the long tail of edge and corner cases standing in the way of real-world autonomous vehicles.

Prof. Marco Hutter & Jonas Frey, ETH

Talk title: “Learning Perception and Navigation: Towards autonomous robots in the wild”

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Prof. Vijay Kumar, UPenn

Talk title: “Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles for Precision Agriculture and Forestry”

 

Autonomous aerial vehicles enable automated creation of high-quality maps of forests and orchards which in turn allow the extraction of actionable information for precision agriculture and forestry. In this talk I will describe our work on developing autonomous micro aerial vehicles, the algorithms used for motion planning and mapping for autonomous flight under the forest canopy and in between tree lines, and the software framework for creating metric-semantic maps. I will also summarize future work on aerial manipulation and our open-source contributions, including our software stack, benchmarks and data sets.