Pascual Campoy

David Perez-Saura, Jose Andres Millan-Romera, Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas et al.

Graph-based representations such as Scene Graphs enable localization in structured indoor environments by matching a locally observed graph, constructed from sensor data, to a prior map. This process is particularly challenging in environments with repetitive or symmetric layouts, where structural cues alone are often insufficient to resolve ambiguities. We propose a semantic-enhanced graph matching approach that explicitly models relations between detected objects and structural elements, such as rooms and wall planes. Objects are detected from RGB-D data and integrated into the graph, and their relations to structural elements are exploited to filter candidate correspondences prior to geometric verification, significantly reducing ambiguity and search complexity. The proposed method is integrated within the iS-Graphs framework and evaluated in synthetic and simulated environments. Results show that semantic relations significantly reduce the number of candidate matches, improve computational efficiency, and enable faster convergence, particularly in symmetric scenarios where purely geometric approaches fail.

David Perez-Saura, Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas, Alvaro J. Gaona et al.

Autonomous drone racing demands robust real-time localization under extreme conditions: high-speed flight, aggressive maneuvers, and payload-constrained platforms that often rely on a single camera for perception. Existing visual SLAM systems, while effective in general scenarios, struggle with motion blur and feature instability inherent to racing dynamics, and do not exploit the structured nature of racing environments. In this work, we present a dual pose-graph architecture that fuses odometry with semantic detections for robust localization. A temporary graph accumulates multiple gate observations between keyframes and optimizes them into a single refined constraint per landmark, which is then promoted to a persistent main graph. This design preserves the information richness of frequent detections while preventing graph growth from degrading real-time performance. The system is designed to be sensor-agnostic, although in this work we validate it using monocular visual-inertial odometry and visual gate detections. Experimental evaluation on the TII-RATM dataset shows a 56% to 74% reduction in ATE compared to standalone VIO, while an ablation study confirms that the dual-graph architecture achieves 10% to 12% higher accuracy than a single-graph baseline at identical computational cost. Deployment in the A2RL competition demonstrated that the system performs real-time onboard localization during flight, reducing the drift of the odometry baseline by up to 4.2 m per lap.

Alejandro Rodriguez-Ramos, Adrian Alvarez-Fernandez Hriday Bavle, Javier Rodriguez-Vazquez et al.

In recent years, high-speed navigation and environment interaction in the context of aerial robotics has become a field of interest for several academic and industrial research studies. In particular, Search and Intercept (SaI) applications for aerial robots pose a compelling research area due to their potential usability in several environments. Nevertheless, SaI tasks involve a challenging development regarding sensory weight, on-board computation resources, actuation design and algorithms for perception and control, among others. In this work, a fully-autonomous aerial robot for high-speed object grasping has been proposed. As an additional sub-task, our system is able to autonomously pierce balloons located in poles close to the surface. Our first contribution is the design of the aerial robot at an actuation and sensory level consisting of a novel gripper design with additional sensors enabling the robot to grasp objects at high speeds. The second contribution is a complete software framework consisting of perception, state estimation, motion planning, motion control and mission control in order to rapid- and robustly perform the autonomous grasping mission. Our approach has been validated in a challenging international competition and has shown outstanding results, being able to autonomously search, follow and grasp a moving object at 6 m/s in an outdoor environment

Simon Martinez-Rozas, Rafael Rey, David Alejo et al.

The paper presents a framework for fire extinguishing in an urban scenario by a team of aerial and ground robots. The system was developed to address Challenge 3 of the 2020Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC). The challenge required to autonomously detect, locate and extinguish fires on different floors of a building, as well as in its surroundings. The multi-robot system developed consists of a heterogeneous robot team of up to three Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and one Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV). We describe the main hardware and software components for UAV and UGVplatforms and also present the main algorithmic components of the system: a 3D LIDAR-based mapping and localization module able to work in GPS-denied scenarios; a global planner and a fast local re-planning system for robot navigation; infrared-based perception and robot actuation control for fire extinguishing; and a mission executive and coordination module based on Behavior Trees. The paper finally describes the results obtained during the competition, where the system worked fully autonomously and scored in all the trials performed. The presented system ended in 7th position out of 20 teams in the Challenge3 competition and in 5th position (out of 17 teams) in the Challenge 3 entry to the Grand Finale (Grand Challenge) of MBZIRC 2020 competition.

Rocío Díaz de León Torres, Martín Molina, Pascual Campoy

This article reviews the applications of Bayesian Networks to Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles (IAV) from the decision making point of view, which represents the final step for fully Autonomous Vehicles (currently under discussion). Until now, when it comes making high level decisions for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), humans have the last word. Based on the works cited in this article and analysis done here, the modules of a general decision making framework and its variables are inferred. Many efforts have been made in the labs showing Bayesian Networks as a promising computer model for decision making. Further research should go into the direction of testing Bayesian Network models in real situations. In addition to the applications, Bayesian Network fundamentals are introduced as elements to consider when developing IAVs with the potential of making high level judgement calls.

Adrian Carrio, Sai Vemprala, Andres Ripoll et al.

Obstacle avoidance is a key feature for safe Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. While solutions have been proposed for static obstacle avoidance, systems enabling avoidance of dynamic objects, such as drones, are hard to implement due to the detection range and field-of-view (FOV) requirements, as well as the constraints for integrating such systems on-board small UAVs. In this work, a dataset of 6k synthetic depth maps of drones has been generated and used to train a state-of-the-art deep learning-based drone detection model. While many sensing technologies can only provide relative altitude and azimuth of an obstacle, our depth map-based approach enables full 3D localization of the obstacle. This is extremely useful for collision avoidance, as 3D localization of detected drones is key to perform efficient collision-free path planning. The proposed detection technique has been validated in several real depth map sequences, with multiple types of drones flying at up to 2 m/s, achieving an average precision of 98.7%, an average recall of 74.7% and a record detection range of 9.5 meters.

Achim Kampker, Mohsen Sefati, Arya Abdul Rachman et al.

Urban-oriented autonomous vehicles require a reliable perception technology to tackle the high amount of uncertainties. The recently introduced compact 3D LIDAR sensor offers a surround spatial information that can be exploited to enhance the vehicle perception. We present a real-time integrated framework of multi-target object detection and tracking using 3D LIDAR geared toward urban use. Our approach combines sensor occlusion-aware detection method with computationally efficient heuristics rule-based filtering and adaptive probabilistic tracking to handle uncertainties arising from sensing limitation of 3D LIDAR and complexity of the target object movement. The evaluation results using real-world pre-recorded 3D LIDAR data and comparison with state-of-the-art works shows that our framework is capable of achieving promising tracking performance in the urban situation.

Manuel Chica, Pascual Campoy

We present a complete methodology for authenticating local bee pollen against fraudulent samples using image processing and machine learning techniques. The proposed standard methods do not need expensive equipment such as advanced microscopes and can be used for a preliminary fast rejection of unknown pollen types. The system is able to rapidly reject the non-local pollen samples with inexpensive hardware and without the need to send the product to the laboratory. Methods are based on the color properties of bee pollen loads images and the use of one-class classifiers which are appropriate to reject unknown pollen samples when there is limited data about them. The validation of the method is carried out by authenticating Spanish bee pollen types. Experimentation shows that the proposed methods can obtain an overall authentication accuracy of 94%. We finally illustrate the user interaction with the software in some practical cases by showing the developed application prototype.