In autonomous and mobile robotics, one of the main challenges is the robust on-the-fly perception of the environment, which is often unknown and dynamic, like in autonomous drone racing. In this work, we propose a novel deep neural network-based perception method for racing gate detection – PencilNet 1 – which relies on a lightweight neural network backbone on top of a pencil filter. This approach unifies predictions of the gates' 2D position, distance, and orientation in a single pose tuple. We show that our method is effective for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer learning that does not need any real-world training samples. Moreover, our framework is highly robust to illumination changes commonly seen under rapid flight compared to state-of-art methods. A thorough set of experiments demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach in multiple challenging scenarios, where the drone completes various tracks under different lighting conditions.
PencilNet:Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer Learning for Robust Gate Perception in Autonomous Drone Racing
2022-10-01
Pham , X H , Sarabakha , A , Odnoshyvkin , M & Kayacan , E 2022 , ' PencilNet : Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer Learning for Robust Gate Perception in Autonomous Drone Racing ' , IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters , vol. 7 , no. 4 , pp. 11847 - 11854 . https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2022.3207545
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
DDC: | 629 |
Are We Ready for Autonomous Drone Racing? The UZH-FPV Drone Racing Dataset
BASE | 2019
|British Library Conference Proceedings | 2018
|