Vaibhav Arcot

Thiago A. Rodrigues, Jay Patrikar, Arnav Choudhry et al.

We autonomously direct a small quadcopter package delivery Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or "drone" to take off, fly a specified route, and land for a total of 209 flights while varying a set of operational parameters. The vehicle was equipped with onboard sensors, including GPS, IMU, voltage and current sensors, and an ultrasonic anemometer, to collect high-resolution data on the inertial states, wind speed, and power consumption. Operational parameters, such as commanded ground speed, payload, and cruise altitude, are varied for each flight. This large data set has a total flight time of 10 hours and 45 minutes and was collected from April to October of 2019 covering a total distance of approximately 65 kilometers. The data collected were validated by comparing flights with similar operational parameters. We believe these data will be of great interest to the research and industrial communities, who can use the data to improve UAV designs, safety, and energy efficiency, as well as advance the physical understanding of in-flight operations for package delivery drones.

Guilherme V. Nardari, Avraham Cohen, Steven W. Chen et al.

In this letter, we present a novel descriptor based on Urquhart tessellations derived from the position of trees in a forest. We propose a framework that uses these descriptors to detect previously seen observations and landmark correspondences, even with partial overlap and noise. We run loop closure detection experiments in simulation and real-world data map-merging from different flights of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in a pine tree forest and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy and robustness.