Swarm of Micro Flying Robots in the Wild

Explore the cutting-edge developments in aerial robotics through this 54-minute conference talk by Xin Zhou at ICBS2024. Delve into the challenges of navigating highly cluttered environments like dense forests with swarms of micro flying robots. Learn about the innovative solutions developed to overcome obstacles such as unknown terrains, narrow passages, and complex swarm coordination. Discover the advancements in miniature, fully autonomous drones equipped with sophisticated trajectory planners that operate efficiently using limited onboard sensor data. Understand how the planning system addresses multiple requirements including flight efficiency, obstacle avoidance, inter-robot collision prevention, and dynamical feasibility. Explore the spatial-temporal joint optimization technique that allows for rapid, high-quality trajectory generation even in the most constrained environments. Gain insights into the integration of this advanced planner into a palm-sized swarm platform, complete with onboard perception, localization, and control capabilities. Examine benchmark comparisons demonstrating the planner's superior performance in trajectory quality and computation speed. Witness the system's extensibility through various real-world field experiments. Grasp how this systematic solution advances aerial robotics in three key areas: navigating cluttered environments, adapting to diverse task requirements, and coordinating swarm behavior without external infrastructure.