We propose a novel approach for aerial video action recognition. Our method is designed for videos captured using UAVs and can run on edge or mobile devices. We present a learning-based approach that uses customized auto zoom to automatically identify the human target and scale it appropriately. This makes it easier to extract the key features and reduces the computational overhead. We also present an efficient temporal reasoning algorithm to capture the action information along the spatial and temporal domains within a controllable computational cost. Our approach has been implemented and evaluated both on the desktop with high-end GPUs and on the low power Robotics RB5 Platform for robots and drones. In practice, we achieve$6.1-7.4 \%$improvement over SOTA in Top-1 accuracy on the RoCoG-v2 dataset, 8.3-10.4% improvement on the UAV-Human dataset and 3.2% improvement on the Drone Action dataset.

Autonomous micro aerial vehicles are deployed for a variety of tasks including surveillance and monitoring. Perching and staring allow the vehicle to monitor targets without flying, saving battery power and increasing the overall mission time without the need to frequently replace batteries. This article addresses the active visual perching (AVP) control problem to autonomously perch on inclined surfaces up to$90^\circ$. Our approach generates dynamically feasible trajectories to navigate and perch on a desired target location while taking into account actuator and field-of-view constraints. By replanning in midflight, we take advantage of more accurate target localization increasing the perching maneuver's robustness to target localization or control errors. We leverage the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions to identify the compatibility between planning objectives and the visual sensing constraint during the planned maneuver. Furthermore, we experimentally identify the corresponding boundary conditions that maximize the spatio-temporal target visibility during the perching maneuver. The proposed approach works on-board in real time with significant computational constraints relying exclusively on cameras and an inertial measurement unit. Experimental results validate the proposed approach and show a higher success rate as well as increased target interception precision and accuracy compared to a one-shot planning approach, while still retaining aggressive capabilities with flight envelopes that include large displacements from the hover position on inclined surfaces up to 90$^\circ$, angular speeds up to 750$^\circ$/s, and accelerations up to 10 m/s$^{2}$.

Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall mission time without actively flying. In this paper, we address the estimation, planning, and control problems for autonomous perching on inclined surfaces with small quadrotors using visual and inertial sensing. We focus on planning and executing dynamically feasible trajectories to navigate and perch to a desired target location with on board sensing and computation. Our planner also supports certain classes of nonlinear global constraints by leveraging an efficient algorithm that we have mathematically verified. The on board cameras and IMU are concurrently used for state estimation and to infer the relative robot/target localization. The proposed solution runs in real-time on board a limited computational unit. Experimental results validate the proposed approach by tackling aggressive perching maneuvers with flight envelopes that include large excursions from the hover position on inclined surfaces up to 90°, angular rates up to 600 deg/s, and accelerations up to 10 m/s2.