Driven by applications like Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), driver-less cars, etc, localization solution has become an active research topic in the past decade. In recent years, Ultra Wideband (UWB) emerged as a promising technology because of its impressive performance in both indoor and outdoor positioning. But algorithms relying only on UWB sensor usually result in high latency and low bandwidth, which is undesirable in some situations such as controlling a MAV. To alleviate this problem, an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) based algorithm is proposed to fuse the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and UWB, which achieved 80Hz 3D localization with significantly improved accuracy and almost no delay. To verify the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed approach, a swarm of 6 MAVs is set up to perform a light show in an indoor exhibition hall. Video and source codes are available at https://github.com/lijx10/uwb-localization
Despite the recent active research on processing point clouds with deep networks, few attention has been on the sensitivity of the networks to rotations. In this paper, we propose a deep learning architecture that achieves discrete SO(2)/SO(3) rotation equivariance for point cloud recognition. Specifically, the rotation of an input point cloud with elements of a rotation group is similar to shuffling the feature vectors generated by our approach. The equivariance is easily reduced to invariance by eliminating the permutation with operations such as maximum or average. Our method can be directly applied to any existing point cloud based networks, resulting in significant improvements in their performance for rotated inputs. We show state-of-the-art results in the classification tasks with various datasets under both SO(2) and SO(3) rotations. In addition, we further analyze the necessary conditions of applying our approach to PointNet [1] based networks.
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have great potentials to be applied for indoor search and rescue missions. In this paper, we propose a modular lightweight design of an autonomous MAV with integrated hardware and software. The MAV is equipped with the 2D laser scanner, camera, mission computer and flight controller, running all the computation onboard in real time. The onboard perception system includes a laser-based SLAM module and a custom-designed visual detection module. A dual Kalman filter design provides robust state estimation by multiple sensor fusion. Specifically, the fusion module provides robust altitude measurement in the circumstance of surface changing. In addition, indoor-outdoor transition is explicitly handled by the fusion module. In order to efficiently navigate through obstacles and adapt to multiple tasks, a task tree-based mission planning method is seamlessly integrated with path planning and control modules. The MAV is capable of searching and rescuing victims from unknown indoor environments effectively. It was validated by our award-winning performance at the 2017 International Micro Air Vehicle Competition (IMAV 2017), held in Toulouse, France. The performance video is available on https://youtu.be/8H19ppS_VXM.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.