We consider the problem of having a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) pursue a second team of evaders while concurrently building a map in an unknown environment. We cast the problem in a probabilistic game theoretical framework, and consider two computationally feasible greedy pursuit policies: local-mar and global-max. To implement this scenario on real UAVs and UGVs, we propose a distributed hierarchical hybrid system architecture which emphasizes the autonomy of each agent, yet allows for coordinated team efforts. We describe the implementation of the architecture on a fleet of UAVs and UGVs, detailing components such as high-level pursuit policy computation, map building and interagent communication, and low-level navigation, sensing, and control. We present both simulation and experimental results of real pursuit-evasion games involving our fleet of UAVs and UGVs, and evaluate the pursuit policies relating expected capture times to the speed and intelligence of the evaders and the sensing capabilities of the pursuers.

In autonomous drone racing, a drone is required to fly through the gates quickly without any collision. Therefore, it is important to detect the gates reliably using computer vision. However, due to the complications such as varying lighting conditions and gates seen overlapped, traditional image processing algorithms based on color and geometry of the gates tend to fail during the actual racing. In this letter, we introduce a convolutional neural network to estimate the center of a gate robustly. Using the detection results, we apply a line-of-sight guidance algorithm. The proposed algorithm is implemented using low cost, off-the-shelf hardware for validation. All vision processing is performed in real time on the onboard NVIDIA Jetson TX2 embedded computer. In a number of tests our proposed framework successfully exhibited fast and reliable detection and navigation performance in indoor environment.

In this paper, we derive an algorithm for enabling a single robotic unmanned aerial vehicle to herd a flock of birds away from a designated volume of space, such as the air space around an airport. The herding algorithm, referred to as the m-waypoint algorithm, is designed using a dynamic model of bird flocking based on Reynolds' rules. We derive bounds on its performance using a combination of reduced-order modeling of the flock's motion, heuristics, and rigorous analysis. A unique contribution of the paper is the experimental demonstration of several facets of the herding algorithm on flocks of live birds reacting to a robotic pursuer. The experiments allow us to estimate several parameters of the flocking model, and especially the interaction between the pursuer and the flock. The herding algorithm is also demonstrated using numerical simulations.

This paper presents an autonomous exploration method in an unknown environment that uses model predictive control (MPC)-based obstacle avoidance with local map building by onboard sensing. An onboard laser scanner is used to build an online map of obstacles around the vehicle with outstanding accuracy. This local map is combined with a real-time MPC algorithm that generates a safe vehicle path, using a cost function that penalizes the proximity to the nearest obstacle. The adjusted trajectory is then sent to a position tracking layer in the hierarchical unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) avionics architecture. In a series of experiments using a Berkeley UAV, the proposed approach successfully guided the vehicle safely through the urban canyon