Deep learning is recently showing outstanding results for solving a wide variety of robotic tasks in the areas of perception, planning, localization, and control. Its excellent capabilities for learning representations from the complex data acquired in real environments make it extremely suitable for many kinds of autonomous robotic applications. In parallel, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are currently being extensively applied for several types of civilian tasks in applications going from security, surveillance, and disaster rescue to parcel delivery or warehouse management. In this paper, a thorough review has been performed on recent reported uses and applications of deep learning for UAVs, including the most relevant developments as well as their performances and limitations. In addition, a detailed explanation of the main deep learning techniques is provided. We conclude with a description of the main challenges for the application of deep learning for UAV-based solutions.

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This paper presents a complete system for automatic recognition and the diagnosis of electrical insulator strings which efficiently combines different deep learning-based components to build a versatile solution to the automation problem of the power line inspection process. To this aim, the proposed system integrates one component responsible for insulator string segmentation and two components in charge of its diagnosis. The insulator string segmentation component consists of a novel fully convolutional network (FCN) architecture, termed Up-Net, which enhances the capabilities of the state-of-the-art U-Net network by introducing new skip connections at certain levels of the architecture. Furthermore, we propose a second variant of the Up-Net network by training it within a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework. The capabilities of the proposed Up-Net variants are incremented by the application of data augmentation and transfer learning techniques, achieving accurate segmentation of the insulator string elements (i.e., discs and caps). Regarding the insulator string diagnosis, we design a convolutional neural network (CNN) which takes as input the mask generated by the insulator string segmentation component and is capable of identifying the absence of a variable number of discs. The second diagnosis component consists of a novel strategy which integrates a Siamese convolutional neural network (SCNN) designed for modeling the similarity between adjacent discs and allowing the detection of several types of disc defects using the same model. The proposed system has been extensively evaluated in several video sequences from real aerial inspections of high-voltage insulators, showing robust insulator recognition and diagnosis capabilities.

Abstract-In this paper a scalable and flexible Architecture for real-time mission planning and dynamic agent-to-task assignment for a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) is presented. The proposed mission planning architecture consists of a Global Mission Planner (GMP) which is responsible of assigning and monitoring different high-level missions through an Agent Mission Planner (AMP), which is in charge of providing and monitoring each task of the mission to each UAV in the swarm. The objective of the proposed architecture is to carry out high-level missions such as autonomous multiagent exploration, automatic target detection and recognition, search and rescue, and other different missions with the ability of dynamically re-adapt the mission in real-time. The proposed architecture has been evaluated in simulation and real indoor flights demonstrating its robustness in different scenarios and its flexibility for real-time mission re-planning and dynamic agent-to-task assignment.

Navigation in unknown indoor environments with fast collision avoidance capabilities is an ongoing research topic. Traditional motion planning algorithms rely on precise maps of the environment, where re-adapting a generated path can be highly demanding in terms of computational cost. In this paper, we present a fast reactive navigation algorithm using Deep Reinforcement Learning applied to multirotor aerial robots. Taking as input the 2D-laser range measurements and the relative position of the aerial robot with respect to the desired goal, the proposed algorithm is successfully trained in a Gazebo-based simulation scenario by adopting an artificial potential field formulation. A thorough evaluation of the trained agent has been carried out both in simulated and real indoor scenarios, showing the appropriate reactive navigation behavior of the agent in the presence of static and dynamic obstacles.

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In this paper, a fully-autonomous quadrotor aerial robot for solving the different missions proposed in the 2016 International Micro Air Vehicle (IMAV) Indoor Competition is presented. The missions proposed in the IMAV 2016 competition involve the execution of high-level missions such as entering and exiting a building, exploring an unknown indoor environment, recognizing and interacting with objects, landing autonomously on a moving platform, etc. For solving the aforementioned missions, a fully-autonomous quadrotor aerial robot has been designed, based on a complete hardware configuration and a versatile software architecture, which allows the aerial robot to complete all the missions in a fully autonomous and consecutive manner. A thorough evaluation of the proposed system has been carried out in both simulated flights, using the Gazebo simulator in combination with PX4 Software-In-The-Loop, and real flights, demonstrating the appropriate capabilities of the proposed system for performing high-level missions and its flexibility for being adapted to a wide variety of applications.