Learning to fly by myself: a self-supervised CNN-based approach for autonomous navigation
File(s)IROS_2018_drone_nav.pdf (1.27 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Kouris, Alexandros
Bouganis, Christos
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)are becoming increasingly popular facilitated by their extensive availability. Autonomous navigation methods can act as an enabler for the safe deployment of drones on a wide range of real-world civilian applications. In this work, we introduce a self-supervised CNN-based approach for indoor robot navigation. Our method addresses the problem of real-time obstacle avoidance, by employing a regression CNN that predicts the agent's distance-to-collision in view of the raw visual input of its on-board monocular camera. The proposed CNN is trained on our custom indoor-flight dataset which is collected and annotated with real-distance labels, in a self-supervised manner using external sensors mounted on an UAV. By simultaneously processing the current and previous input frame, the proposed CNN extracts spatio-temporal features that encapsulate both static appearance and motion information to estimate the robot's distance to its closest obstacle towards multiple directions. These predictions are used to modulate the yaw and linear velocity of the UAV, in order to navigate autonomously and avoid collisions. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach learns a navigation policy that achieves high accuracy on real-world indoor flights, outperforming previously proposed methods from the literature.
Date Issued
2019-01-07
Date Acceptance
2018-10-01
Citation
2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2019
Publisher
IEEE
Journal / Book Title
2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Copyright Statement
© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Source
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018), 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Information Systems
Robotics
Computer Science
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2018-10-01
Finish Date
2018-10-05
Coverage Spatial
Madrid, Spain