Lab Meeting, February 20, 2014 (Jim): Learning monocular reactive uav control in cluttered natural environments

Title: Learning monocular reactive uav control in cluttered natural environments

Authors:
Stephane Ross, Narek Melik-Barkhudarov, Kumar Shaurya Shankar, Andreas Wendel, Debadeepta Dey, J. Andrew (Drew) Bagnell, and Martial Hebert

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, March, 2013.

Abstract:
... Unlike large vehicles, MAVs can only carry very light sensors, such as cameras, making autonomous navigation through obstacles much more challenging. In this paper, we describe a system that navigates a small quadrotor helicopter autonomously at low altitude through natural forest environments. Using only a single cheap camera to perceive the environment, we are able to maintain a constant velocity of up to 1.5m/s. Given a small set of human pilot demonstrations, we use recent state-of-theart imitation learning techniques to train a controller that can avoid trees by adapting the MAVs heading. We demonstrate the performance of our system in a more controlled environment indoors, and in real natural forest environments outdoors.

Link