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Main Authors: Tovanche-Picon, Hector, Gonzalez-Trejo, Javier, Flores-Abad, Angel, Mercado-Ravell, Diego
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13792
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author Tovanche-Picon, Hector
Gonzalez-Trejo, Javier
Flores-Abad, Angel
Mercado-Ravell, Diego
author_facet Tovanche-Picon, Hector
Gonzalez-Trejo, Javier
Flores-Abad, Angel
Mercado-Ravell, Diego
contents Safe autonomous landing for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in populated areas is a crucial aspect for successful urban deployment, particularly in emergency landing situations. Nonetheless, validating autonomous landing in real scenarios is a challenging task involving a high risk of injuring people. In this work, we propose a framework for real-time safe and thorough evaluation of vision-based autonomous landing in populated scenarios, using photo-realistic virtual environments. We propose to use the Unreal graphics engine coupled with the AirSim plugin for drone's simulation, and evaluate autonomous landing strategies based on visual detection of Safe Landing Zones (SLZ) in populated scenarios. Then, we study two different criteria for selecting the "best" SLZ, and evaluate them during autonomous landing of a virtual drone in different scenarios and conditions, under different distributions of people in urban scenes, including moving people. We evaluate different metrics to quantify the performance of the landing strategies, establishing a baseline for comparison with future works in this challenging task, and analyze them through an important number of randomized iterations. The study suggests that the use of the autonomous landing algorithms considerably helps to prevent accidents involving humans, which may allow to unleash the full potential of drones in urban environments near to people.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2203_13792
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Visual-based Safe Landing for UAVs in Populated Areas: Real-time Validation in Virtual Environments
Tovanche-Picon, Hector
Gonzalez-Trejo, Javier
Flores-Abad, Angel
Mercado-Ravell, Diego
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Safe autonomous landing for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in populated areas is a crucial aspect for successful urban deployment, particularly in emergency landing situations. Nonetheless, validating autonomous landing in real scenarios is a challenging task involving a high risk of injuring people. In this work, we propose a framework for real-time safe and thorough evaluation of vision-based autonomous landing in populated scenarios, using photo-realistic virtual environments. We propose to use the Unreal graphics engine coupled with the AirSim plugin for drone's simulation, and evaluate autonomous landing strategies based on visual detection of Safe Landing Zones (SLZ) in populated scenarios. Then, we study two different criteria for selecting the "best" SLZ, and evaluate them during autonomous landing of a virtual drone in different scenarios and conditions, under different distributions of people in urban scenes, including moving people. We evaluate different metrics to quantify the performance of the landing strategies, establishing a baseline for comparison with future works in this challenging task, and analyze them through an important number of randomized iterations. The study suggests that the use of the autonomous landing algorithms considerably helps to prevent accidents involving humans, which may allow to unleash the full potential of drones in urban environments near to people.
title Visual-based Safe Landing for UAVs in Populated Areas: Real-time Validation in Virtual Environments
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13792