Ultra-High-Frequency Harmony: mmWave Radar and Event Camera Orchestrate Accurate Drone Landing
This work addresses the need for safe and efficient drone landings, particularly for delivery applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing mmWave-camera fusion by replacing the camera type.
The paper tackled the problem of precise drone landing by developing mmE-Loc, a ground localization system that combines mmWave radar with an event camera to overcome throughput bottlenecks, achieving improved localization accuracy and latency in real-world experiments.
For precise, efficient, and safe drone landings, ground platforms should real-time, accurately locate descending drones and guide them to designated spots. While mmWave sensing combined with cameras improves localization accuracy, the lower sampling frequency of traditional frame cameras compared to mmWave radar creates bottlenecks in system throughput. In this work, we replace the traditional frame camera with event camera, a novel sensor that harmonizes in sampling frequency with mmWave radar within the ground platform setup, and introduce mmE-Loc, a high-precision, low-latency ground localization system designed for drone landings. To fully leverage the \textit{temporal consistency} and \textit{spatial complementarity} between these modalities, we propose two innovative modules, \textit{consistency-instructed collaborative tracking} and \textit{graph-informed adaptive joint optimization}, for accurate drone measurement extraction and efficient sensor fusion. Extensive real-world experiments in landing scenarios from a leading drone delivery company demonstrate that mmE-Loc outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both localization accuracy and latency.