An End-to-end Flight Control Network for High-speed UAV Obstacle Avoidance based on Event-Depth Fusion

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Shang, Dikai, Zhao, Jingyue, Xu, Shi, Ye, Nanyang, Wang, Lei
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Shang, Dikai
Zhao, Jingyue
Xu, Shi
Ye, Nanyang
Wang, Lei
author_facet Shang, Dikai
Zhao, Jingyue
Xu, Shi
Ye, Nanyang
Wang, Lei
contents Achieving safe, high-speed autonomous flight in complex environments with static, dynamic, or mixed obstacles remains challenging, as a single perception modality is incomplete. Depth cameras are effective for static objects but suffer from motion blur at high speeds. Conversely, event cameras excel at capturing rapid motion but struggle to perceive static scenes. To exploit the complementary strengths of both sensors, we propose an end-to-end flight control network that achieves feature-level fusion of depth images and event data through a bidirectional crossattention module. The end-to-end network is trained via imitation learning, which relies on high-quality supervision. Building on this insight, we design an efficient expert planner using Spherical Principal Search (SPS). This planner reduces computational complexity from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ while generating smoother trajectories, achieving over 80% success rate at 17m/s--nearly 20% higher than traditional planners. Simulation experiments show that our method attains a 70-80% success rate at 17 m/s across varied scenes, surpassing single-modality and unidirectional fusion models by 10-20%. These results demonstrate that bidirectional fusion effectively integrates event and depth information, enabling more reliable obstacle avoidance in complex environments with both static and dynamic objects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_27181
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An End-to-end Flight Control Network for High-speed UAV Obstacle Avoidance based on Event-Depth Fusion
Shang, Dikai
Zhao, Jingyue
Xu, Shi
Ye, Nanyang
Wang, Lei
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Achieving safe, high-speed autonomous flight in complex environments with static, dynamic, or mixed obstacles remains challenging, as a single perception modality is incomplete. Depth cameras are effective for static objects but suffer from motion blur at high speeds. Conversely, event cameras excel at capturing rapid motion but struggle to perceive static scenes. To exploit the complementary strengths of both sensors, we propose an end-to-end flight control network that achieves feature-level fusion of depth images and event data through a bidirectional crossattention module. The end-to-end network is trained via imitation learning, which relies on high-quality supervision. Building on this insight, we design an efficient expert planner using Spherical Principal Search (SPS). This planner reduces computational complexity from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ while generating smoother trajectories, achieving over 80% success rate at 17m/s--nearly 20% higher than traditional planners. Simulation experiments show that our method attains a 70-80% success rate at 17 m/s across varied scenes, surpassing single-modality and unidirectional fusion models by 10-20%. These results demonstrate that bidirectional fusion effectively integrates event and depth information, enabling more reliable obstacle avoidance in complex environments with both static and dynamic objects.
title An End-to-end Flight Control Network for High-speed UAV Obstacle Avoidance based on Event-Depth Fusion
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27181