Sina Sajjadi

Jacopo Panerati, Sina Sajjadi, Sina Soleymanpour et al.

Unmanned aerial vehicles are rapidly transforming multiple applications, from agricultural and infrastructure monitoring to logistics and defense. Introducing greater autonomy to these systems can simultaneously make them more effective as well as reliable. Thus, the ability to rapidly engineer and deploy autonomous aerial systems has become of strategic importance. In the 2010s, a combination of high-performance compute, data, and open-source software led to the current deep learning and AI boom, unlocking decades of prior theoretical work. Robotics is on the cusp of a similar transformation. However, physical AI faces unique hurdles, often combined under the umbrella term "simulation-to-reality gap". These span from modeling shortcomings to the complexity of vertically integrating the highly heterogeneous hardware and software systems typically found in field robots. To address the latter, we introduce aerial-autonomy-stack, an open-source, end-to-end framework designed to streamline the pipeline from (GPU-accelerated) perception to (flight controller-based) action. Our stack allows the development of aerial autonomy using ROS2 and provides a common interface for two of the most popular autopilots: PX4 and ArduPilot. We show that it supports over 20x faster-than-real-time, end-to-end simulation of a complete development and deployment stack -- including edge compute and networking -- significantly compressing the build-test-release cycle of perception-based autonomy.

Sina Sajjadi, Jacopo Panerati, Sina Soleymanpour et al.

Autonomous landing in cluttered or unstructured environments remains a safety-critical challenge for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly under noisy perception caused by sensor uncertainty and platform-induced disturbances such as vibration. This paper presents an evidence-based probabilistic framework for autonomous UAV landing that explicitly separates decision-making under uncertainty from execution via visual servoing. Landing safety is modeled as a latent variable and inferred through recursive accumulation of frame-wise visual likelihoods derived from flatness, slope, and obstacle cues, yielding a temporally consistent belief map that is robust to transient perception errors. Physical feasibility is enforced through a hard geometric constraint based on the minimum required landing radius of the UAV, ensuring that undersized but visually appealing regions are rejected. The final landing site is selected using constrained maximum a posteriori estimation. Once selected, the UAV locks onto the target region using ORB feature tracking and performs precise alignment and descent via image-based visual servoing (IBVS). The proposed approach is validated through both real-world laboratory experiments and high-fidelity simulations in Nvidia Isaac Sim, demonstrating consistent, cautious, and stable landing behavior across domains.