Abstract-Cameras provide a rich source of information while being passive, cheap and lightweight for small and medium Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this work we present the first implementation of receding horizon control, which is widely used in ground vehicles, with monocular vision as the only sensing mode for autonomous UAV flight in dense clutter. We make it feasible on UAVs via a number of contributions: novel coupling of perception and control via relevant and diverse, multiple interpretations of the scene around the robot, leveraging recent advances in machine learning to showcase anytime budgeted cost-sensitive feature selection, and fast non-linear regression for monocular depth prediction. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our novel pipeline via real world experiments of more than 2 kms through dense trees with a quadrotor built from off-the-shelf parts. Moreover our pipeline is designed to combine information from other modalities like stereo and lidar as well if available.

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As robots aspire for long-term autonomous operations in complex dynamic environments, the ability to reliably take mission-critical decisions in ambiguous situations becomes critical. This motivates the need to build systems that have situational awareness to assess how qualified they are at that moment to make a decision. We call this self-evaluating capability as introspection. In this paper, we take a small step in this direction and propose a generic framework for introspective behavior in perception systems. Our goal is to learn a model to reliably predict failures in a given system, with respect to a task, directly from input sensor data. We present this in the context of vision-based autonomous MAV flight in outdoor natural environments, and show that it effectively handles uncertain situations.1 Introspection. The act or process of self-awareness; contemplation of one's own thoughts or feelings, and in the case of a robot, its current state.

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