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Where Are the Gates: Discovering Effective Waypoints for Autonomous Drone Racing

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Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2022 (IBERAMIA 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13788))

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Abstract

We present a two-step approach for autonomous drone racing that does not require information about the race track (i.e., number of gates, their position and orientation), only the drone’s position in the arena, which could be obtained with GPS, a motion capture system or visual SLAM. We use a neural pilot, trained to regress basic flight commands from camera images where a gate is observed, to enable a drone to navigate the unknown race track autonomously, although at a low speed. During this navigation stage, we use a Single Shot Detector to visually detect the gates. The latter is used to identify the drone’s positions before and after crossing the gate. Once discovered, these positions are used as waypoints in a flight controller to perform a much faster flight to navigate throughout the race track. This approach resembles how human pilots train on an unknown race track, performing several laps to discover key areas where the drone must increase or decrease its speed to cross all the gates successfully. Our approach has been evaluated in the RotorS simulator, comparing it with the performance of a human pilot and obtaining very similar time results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science at Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE), Puebla, Mexico

    Leticia Oyuki Rojas-Perez & Jose Martinez-Carranza

Authors
  1. Leticia Oyuki Rojas-Perez
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  2. Jose Martinez-Carranza
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Leticia Oyuki Rojas-Perez or Jose Martinez-Carranza .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia

  2. Fluminense Federal University, Niterói, Brazil

    Mariza Ferro

  3. University of Cartagena, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia

    Julio Cesar Rodríguez Ribón

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Rojas-Perez, L.O., Martinez-Carranza, J. (2022). Where Are the Gates: Discovering Effective Waypoints for Autonomous Drone Racing. In: Bicharra Garcia, A.C., Ferro, M., Rodríguez Ribón, J.C. (eds) Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2022. IBERAMIA 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13788. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22419-5_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22419-5_30

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-22418-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-22419-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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