Yao He

Devansh Dhrafani, Yifei Liu, Andrew Jong et al.

Robust depth perception in visually-degraded environments is crucial for autonomous aerial systems. Thermal imaging cameras, which capture infrared radiation, are robust to visual degradation. However, due to lack of a large-scale dataset, the use of thermal cameras for unmanned aerial system (UAS) depth perception has remained largely unexplored. This paper presents a stereo thermal depth perception dataset for autonomous aerial perception applications. The dataset consists of stereo thermal images, LiDAR, IMU and ground truth depth maps captured in urban and forest settings under diverse conditions like day, night, rain, and smoke. We benchmark representative stereo depth estimation algorithms, offering insights into their performance in degraded conditions. Models trained on our dataset generalize well to unseen smoky conditions, highlighting the robustness of stereo thermal imaging for depth perception. We aim for this work to enhance robotic perception in disaster scenarios, allowing for exploration and operations in previously unreachable areas. The dataset and source code are available at https://firestereo.github.io.

Parv Kapoor, Ian Higgins, Nikhil Keetha et al.

Assured safe-separation is essential for achieving seamless high-density operation of airborne vehicles in a shared airspace. To equip resource-constrained aerial systems with this safety-critical capability, we present ViSafe, a high-speed vision-only airborne collision avoidance system. ViSafe offers a full-stack solution to the Detect and Avoid (DAA) problem by tightly integrating a learning-based edge-AI framework with a custom multi-camera hardware prototype designed under SWaP-C constraints. By leveraging perceptual input-focused control barrier functions (CBF) to design, encode, and enforce safety thresholds, ViSafe can provide provably safe runtime guarantees for self-separation in high-speed aerial operations. We evaluate ViSafe's performance through an extensive test campaign involving both simulated digital twins and real-world flight scenarios. By independently varying agent types, closure rates, interaction geometries, and environmental conditions (e.g., weather and lighting), we demonstrate that ViSafe consistently ensures self-separation across diverse scenarios. In first-of-its-kind real-world high-speed collision avoidance tests with closure rates reaching 144 km/h, ViSafe sets a new benchmark for vision-only autonomous collision avoidance, establishing a new standard for safety in high-speed aerial navigation.

Yao He, Huai Yu, Wen Yang et al.

Efficiency and robustness are the essential criteria for the visual-inertial odometry (VIO) system. To process massive visual data, the high cost on CPU resources and computation latency limits VIO's possibility in integration with other applications. Recently, the powerful embedded GPUs have great potentials to improve the front-end image processing capability. Meanwhile, multi-camera systems can increase the visual constraints for back-end optimization. Inspired by these insights, we incorporate the GPU-enhanced algorithms in the field of VIO and thus propose a new front-end with NVIDIA Vision Programming Interface (VPI). This new front-end then enables multi-camera VIO feature association and provides more stable back-end pose optimization. Experiments with our new front-end on monocular datasets show the CPU resource occupation rate and computational latency are reduced by 40.4% and 50.6% without losing accuracy compared with the original VIO. The multi-camera system shows a higher VIO initialization success rate and better robustness overall state estimation.