Collaborate Disseminate
Even with all the technological advancements in recent years, autonomous systems have never been able to keep up with top-level human racing drone pilots. However, it looks like that gap …read more Continue reading Autonomous Racing Drones Are Starting To Beat Human Pilots
When it was first announced that limits would be placed on recreational RC aircraft heavier than 250 grams, many assumed the new rules meant an end to home built quadcopters. …read more Continue reading Resilient AI Drone Packs it all in Under 250 Grams
It’s amazing how many things have managed to move online in recent weeks, many with a beneficial side effect of eliminating travel making them more accessible to everyone around the world. Though some events had a virtual track before it was cool, among them the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) robotics …read more
Continue reading Assemble Your (Virtual) Robotic Underground Exploration Team
Drones have come a long way in the past decade, and a lot of the pioneering work that made them mainstream was done by individual hackers and small teams. This often involves cobbling together components into flying crow’s nests of wiring. To streamline things a bit for hackers, the team …read more
Robots might be finding their footing above ground, but today’s autonomous robots have a difficult time operating underground. DARPA wanted to give the state of the art a push forward, so they are running a Subterranean (SubT) Challenge which just wrapped up its latest round. A great review of this …read more
Continue reading DARPA Challenge Autonomous Robot Teams To Navigate Unfinished Nuclear Power Plant
Currently underway is the DARPA Subterranean Challenge (SubT) systems competition for urban circuits streamed live on YouTube now through Wednesday, February 26th.
The DARPA Grand Challenge of 2004 kicked research and development of autonomous vehicles into high gear. Many components on today’s self-driving vehicles can be traced back to systems …read more
Continue reading DARPA Subterranean Challenge Urban Circuit Now Livestreaming
Recently the MAVLab (Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory) at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands proudly proclaimed having made an autonomic drone that’s a mere 72 grams in weight. The best part? It’s designed to take part in drone races. What this means is that using a single camera …read more
Continue reading Making Autonomous Racing Drones Lean And Mean
We all love reading about creative problem-solving work done by competitors in past DARPA robotic challenges. Some of us even have ambition to join the fray and compete first-hand instead of just reading about them after the fact. If this describes you, step on up to the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.
Following up on past challenges to build autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, DARPA now wants to focus collective brainpower solving problems encountered by robots working underground. There will be two competition tracks: the Systems Track is what we’ve come to expect, where teams build both the hardware and software of …read more
Increasingly these days drones are being used for urban surveillance, delivery, and examining architectural structures. To do this autonomously often involves using “map-localize-plan” techniques wherein first, the location is determined on a map using GPS, and then based on that, control commands are produced.
A neural network that does steering and collision prediction can compliment the map-localize-plan techniques. However, the neural network needs to be trained using video taken from actual flying drones. But generating that training video involves many hours of flying drones at street level putting vehicles and pedestrians at risk. To train their DroNet, Researchers from the …read more
Continue reading Delivery Drones Can Learn From Driving And Cycling
The IMAV (International Micro Air Vehicle) conference and competition is a yearly flying robotics competition hosted by a different University every year. AKAMAV – a university student group at TU Braunschweig in Germany – have written up a fascinating and detailed account of what it was like to compete (and take first place) in 2016’s eleven-mission event hosted by the Beijing Institute of Technology.
AKAMAV’s debrief of IMAV 2016 is well-written and insightful. It covers not only the five outdoor and six indoor missions, but also details what it was like to prepare for and compete in such an intensive …read more
Continue reading Taking First Place at IMAV 2016 Drone Competition