Active propulsion noise shaping for multi-rotor aircraft localization

Gabriele Serussi*, Tamir Shor*, Tom Hirshberg, Chaim Baskin, Alex Bronstein -

Technion Institute of Technology

* Denotes equal contribution

Multi-rotor aerial autonomous vehicles (MAVs) primarily rely on vision for navigation purposes. However, visual localization and odometry techniques suffer from poor performance in low or direct sunlight, a limited field of view, and vulnerability to occlusions. Acoustic sensing can serve as a complementary or even alternative modality for vision in many situations, and it also has the added benefits of lower system cost and energy footprint, which is especially important for micro aircraft. This paper proposes actively controlling and shaping the aircraft propulsion noise generated by the rotors to benefit localization tasks, rather than considering it a harmful nuisance. We present a neural network architecture for selfnoise-based localization in a known environment. We show that training it simultaneously with learning time-varying rotor phase modulation achieves accurate and robust localization. The proposed methods are evaluated using a computationally affordable simulation of MAV rotor noise in 2D acoustic environments that is fitted to real recordings of rotor pressure fields.

Pressure Field Simulation:

Description

Official implementation of our Propulsion Noise-based localization algorithm.

Setup

Environment

To set up our environment, please run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

or

conda install --file requirements.txt

Usage

Repo Layout

Explain repo layout e.g.

outputs/
|-- folder1/
|   |-- smth.py 
|   |-- othersmth.py
|   |-- ...
|   |-- lastsmth.py
|-- folder_2/
|   |-- smth.py 
|   |-- othersmth.py
|   |-- ...
|   |-- lastsmth.py
...

Data

• Link real recordings and explain how to create our simulation per experiment

Forward Model

Forward Process Layout

• Explain how to train forward model

Inverse Model

• Explain how to train inverse model for all experiments

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by ERC StG EARS. We are grateful to Yair Atzmon, Matan Jacoby, Aram Movsisian, and Alon Gil-Ad for their help with the data acquisition.

Citation

If you use this code for your research, please cite the following work:

@misc{@article{gabriele2024active,
  title={Active propulsion noise shaping for multi-rotor aircraft localization},
  author={Gabriele, Serussi and Tamir, Shor and Tom, Hirshberg and Chaim, Baskin and Alex, Bronstein},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.17289},
  year={2024}
}
}