Last week it was time for the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), which is one of the biggest yearly robotics conferences! In previous editions (see 2018 blog post, 2019 event page), we joined IROS’ exhibition and showed an autonomous demos for everybody to enjoy during the coffee breaks. Then… as everybody knows… the Covid-19 pandamic hit and we had to cancel our plans to go to the 2020’s Las Vegas edition. This year’s IROS was supposed to be held in Prague, but was very early announced that this was going to be an online edition.
Eventhough we considered joining IROS’s online exhibition, after our decision to organize the Bitcraze Awesome Meetup (BAM) days as a celebration to our 10 year anniversary (see this blo gpost), we wouldn’t have enough time to prepare for both. However, we still signed up for the conference itself, so we could see how and where the Crazyflie is used in the robotics community! So this blog post will give a list and small overview of the Crazyflie-fueled research with some highlights.
Crazyflie as a Demonstration Tool in Research
A common use-case that we saw is to use the Crazyflie as a research demonstration tool. In the case of designing algorithms for quadcopters, many of the researchers we heard from or talked to told us that there is significant added value to demonstrate their ideas on a real platform. Then it can be truly evaluated with real environmental issues and platform dynamics. For this, the majority of the papers have used the ROS package developed for the CrazySwarm project but some researchers has gone as far as implementing it fully on the Crazyflie’s MCU [6, 8]!
We also noticed the large spread of the Crazyflie-featured papers throughout the sessions of the conference. A bunch of the papers could obviously be found in Aerial System sub-sessions as in ‘Perception and Autonomy’ [1], ‘Applications’ [3], ‘Mechanics and Control’ [4 , 5], but many were spread out in areas like Reinforcement Learning [2], Localization [6] and Collision avoidance [7]. There were also some papers to be found in the Swarm Robotics session [8, 9], as well as in Distributed Robot Systems [10].
Note that there is usually quite some overlap between the different sessions, but it is still very exciting to see that the Crazyflie being used in so many fields!
Highlights and the Community
We saw lots of awesome applications but there are a few that we really like to highlight! There was a presentation of an actual solar-powered Crazyflie [2] which can literally fly forever. This research was done by the same group at the University of Washington that also was featured in a blog post last year, and who is responsible for the Smellicopter. Also, our jaw literally dropped at the sight of the 4 Crazyflie-fueled mega-copter by the University of California, Los Angeles [4, 5]. Last but not least, the fully onboard autonomous gas-seeking swarm, Sniffybug [8], from the MAVLab (TU Delft), never stops to amaze us. They wrote a blog post about their work on our website this summer!
We are hoping for more interesting blog posts related to the papers in the list below in the future. We also would like to invite all the researchers, who have been working with the Crazyflie, to join us for discussions at the Community Q&A at the BAMdays. Most of the amazing aspects of the Crazyflie in terms of autonomy, localization and swarming have all been contributions of the research community in the past. So join the discussion to continue that path in order to bring the Crazyflie to a new level!
List of IROS 2021 Papers featuring the Crazyflie
Here is a list of all the Crazyflie-related papers we could find, but please let us know if we are missing any!
- [1] Target-Visible Polynomial Trajectory Generation within an MAV Team Yunwoo Lee, Jungwon Park, Boseong Jeon and H. Jin Kim
- Lab for Autonomous Robotic Research (LARR), Seoul National University
- Video
- [2] Inclined Quadrotor Landing using Deep Reinforcement Learning Jacob E. Kooi and Robert Babuska
- Cognitive Robotics, Delft University of Technology
- ArXiv Preprint
- Video
- [3] Toward battery-free flight: Duty cycled recharging of small drones Nishant Elkunchwar, Suvesha Chandrasekaran, Vikram Iyer and Sawyer B. Fuller
- Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington
- [4] An Over-Actuated Multi-Rotor Aerial Vehicle with Unconstrained Attitude Angles and High Thrust Efficiencies Pengkang Yu, Yao Su , Matthew J. Gerber, Lecheng Ruan and Tsu-Chin Tsao
- University of California, Los Angeles
- Paper IEEExplore
- [5] Nullspace-Based Control Allocation of Overactuated UAV Platforms Yao Su, Pengkang Yu, Matthew J. Gerber, Lecheng Ruan and Tsu-Chin Tsao
- University of California, Los Angeles
- [6] A Computationally Efficient Moving Horizon Estimator for Ultra-Wideband Localization on Small Quadrotors Sven Pfeiffer, Christophe de Wagter and Guido C.H.E. de Croon
- MAVlab, Delft University of Technology
- Paper IEEExplore
- [7] A Scalable Distributed Collision Avoidance Scheme for Multi-agent UAV systems Bjorn Lindqvist, Pantelis Sopasakis and George Nikolakopoulos
- Robotics and AI team, Luleå University of Technology
- Video
- ArXiv Preprint
- [8] Sniffy Bug: A Fully Autonomous Swarm of Gas-Seeking Nano Quadcopters in Cluttered Environments
- Bardienus P. Duisterhof Shushuai Li Javier Burgues, Vijay Janapa Reddi and Guido C.H.E. de Croon
- MAVlab, Delft University of Technology
- Video playlist
- ArXiv Preprint
- [9] micROS.BT: An Event-Driven Behavior Tree Framework for Swarm Robots Yunlong Wu, Jinghua Li, Huadong Dai, Xiaodong Yi, Yanzhen Wang and Xuejun Yang
- Artificial Intelligence Research Center, National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology, Beijing
- [10] Neural Tree Expansion for Multi-Robot Planning in Non-Cooperative Environments Benjamin Riviere, Wolfgang Honig, Matthew Anderson and Soon-Jo Chung
- Aerospace laboratories, Caltech
- Video
- ArXiv Preprint
Update 21-10-6
- [11] Trust your supervisor: quadrotor obstacle avoidance using controlled invariant sets Luigi Pannocchi, Tzanis Anevlavis, Paulo Tabuada
- University of California, Los Angeles
- [12] Continuous-time Gaussian Process Trajectory Generation for Multi-robot Formation via Probabilistic Inference Shuang Guo , Bo Liu , Shen Zhan , Jifeng Guo and Changhong Wang
- Harbin institute of Technology
- [13] Non-Prehensile Manipulation of Cuboid Objects Using a Catenary Robot Gustavo A. Cardona , Diego S. D’Antonio , Cristian-Ioan Vasile and David Saldana
- Lehigh University