This is the autonomous flight code stack used at KumarRobotics, providing a complete solution for GPS-denied quadcopter autonomy. It has been tested extensively in challenging urban and rural (under forest canopy) environments.

High-level Code Structure

Documentation and Instructions

Please refer to our Wiki page for detailed instructions about how to use this code.

Videos

Real-world experiments on large-scale autonomous flight and semantic SLAM in forests: 3-min video-only version and 5-min voice-over version

Experiments in fast, autonomous, GPS-Denied quadrotor flight

Simulation experiments on fast autonomous flight in urban and rural environments

Contributing

Report issues: Open an issue on Github.

Merge code changes: Open a pull request on Github.

Citation

If you use this stack in your work, please cite:

@inproceedings{liu2022large,
title={Large-scale Autonomous Flight with Real-time Semantic SLAM under Dense Forest Canopy},
author={Liu, Xu and Nardari, Guilherme V and Ojeda, Fernando Cladera and Tao, Yuezhan and Zhou, Alex and Donnelly, Thomas and Qu, Chao and Chen, Steven W and Romero, Roseli AF and Taylor, Camillo J and Kumar, Vijay},
journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)},
year={2022}
}

@article{mohta2018fast,
  title={Fast, autonomous flight in GPS-denied and cluttered environments},
  author={Mohta, Kartik and Watterson, Michael and Mulgaonkar, Yash and Liu, Sikang and Qu, Chao and Makineni, Anurag and Saulnier, Kelsey and Sun, Ke and Zhu, Alex and Delmerico, Jeffrey and others},
  journal={Journal of Field Robotics},
  volume={35},
  number={1},
  pages={101--120},
  year={2018},
  publisher={Wiley Online Library}
}

Acknowledgement

This is a multi-year project. We gratefully acknowledge contributions from our current members and lab alumni, which include:

Kartik Mohta, Xu Liu, Sikang Liu, Fernando Cladera Ojeda, Chao Qu, Michael Watterson, Dinesh Thakur, Ke Sun, Steven W. Chen, Bernd Pfrommer, Yuezhan Tao, Laura Jarin-Lipschitz, Anurag Makineni, Justin Thomas, Guilherme V. Nardari.

We also thank our funding agencies.

License

This code is released using the Penn Software Licence. Please refer to LICENSE.txt for details.