November 22, 2019
Challenges and Opportunities for Autonomous Navigation of Micro Aerial Vehicles
Flying Robots often called drones are starting to play a major role in several tasks such as search and rescue, interaction with the environment, inspection, patrolling and monitoring. Agile navigation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) through unknown environments poses a number of challenges in terms of perception, state estimation, planning, and control. To achieve this, MAVs have to localize themselves and coordinate between each other in unstructured environments. In this talk, I will present some recent research results on high speed and agile flight maneuvers for navigation, transportation, physical environment interaction, and human drone collaboration using a minimal on-board sensor suite composed by a single camera system and IMU. Finally, I will also present some recent achievements that can improve the autonomy of micro and nano platforms recovering the robot’s state just using inertial data and optionally the information from vision sensors.
Giuseppe Loianno is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the Tandon School of Engineering of New York University.
He leads the Agile Robotics and Perception Lab (ARPL) that performs fundamental and applied research in the area of robotics autonomy. The main mission of the lab is to create agile autonomous machines that can navigate all by themselves using only onboard sensors such as in unstructured, and dynamically changing environments and without relying on external infrastructure, such as GPS or motion capture systems. The machines need to be active, they should collaborate with humans and between each other and they need to navigate in the unknown environment extracting the best knowledge from it. For specific projects please visit the lab Agile Robotics and Perception Lab (ARPL).
He holds a B.Sc and M.Sc in Automation Engineering both with honours at University of Naples Federico II in December 2007 and February 2010 respectively.
From August 2008 till March 2009 he has been an exchange student at KTH (Royal Insitute of Technology) in Stockholm, then from September 2009 till March 2010 he developed his master thesis at ETH Zurich. He was a Post Doctoral researcher from June 2014 to May 2015 working with Prof. Dr. Vijay Kumar.
From June 2015 to August 2018 he was a lecturer, research scientist, and team leader at the GRASP Lab at University of Pennsylvania.