Visually Guided Balloon Popping with an Autonomous MAV at MBZIRC 2020
This addresses the challenge of robust real-time perception and control for autonomous MAVs in dynamic tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing visually guided systems.
The researchers tackled the problem of autonomous balloon popping with a micro aerial vehicle using only onboard sensing and computing, achieving success in popping all five balloons in under two minutes per run during a competition.
Visually guided control of micro aerial vehicles (MAV) demands for robust real-time perception, fast trajectory generation, and a capable flight platform. We present a fully autonomous MAV that is able to pop balloons, relying only on onboard sensing and computing. The system is evaluated with real robot experiments during the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020 where it showed its resilience and speed. In all three competition runs we were able to pop all five balloons in less than two minutes flight time with a single MAV.