Autonomous Flying Robots in Real-world Conditions: Transfer from Robotic Competitions into Industrial Applications
This presentation aims to show that robotic competitions may bring valuable scientific results and publications in top robotic journals but can also motivate the usage of state-of-the-art robotic solutions in industrial applications. In the talk, I will present the latest results of our endeavor towards deployment of fully autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with onboard artificial intelligence in real indoor and outdoor tasks, which was achieved by the Multi-robot Systems group at the Czech Technical University in Prague. I will be mainly following 3 success stories that happened after our successful participation in DARPA SubT, MBZIRC 2020, and MBZIRC 2017 competitions: 1) The latest results in indoor documentation of large historical objects (cathedrals) by formations of cooperating UAVs, where one MAV carries a camera and its neighbors carry light sources with the possibility to set a relative angle between the camera axis and the lights as required (using achievements in DARPA SubT). 2) The autonomous firefighting drone DOFEC using onboard intelligence for fire localization and extinction in high-rise buildings (based on results in MBZIRC 2020). 3) The final stage of the fully autonomous flying robot, Eagle.one hunting for unauthorized drones (integrating results of MBZIRC 2020 and 2017).