A heterogeneous micro aerial vehicles (MAV) swarm consists of resource-intensive but expensive advanced MAVs (AMAVs) and resource-limited but cost-effective basic MAVs (BMAVs), offering opportunities in diverse fields. Accurate and real-time localization is crucial for MAV swarms, but current practices lack a low-cost, high-precision, and real-time solution, especially for lightweight BMAVs. We find an opportunity to accomplish the task by transforming AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures for BMAVs. However, translating this insight into a practical system is challenging due to issues in estimating locations with diverse and unknown localization errors of BMAVs, and allocating resources of AMAVs considering interconnected influential factors. This work introduces TransformLoc, a new framework that transforms AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures, specifically designed for low-cost and resource-constrained BMAVs. We design an error-aware joint location estimation model to perform intermittent joint estimation for BMAVs and introduce a similarity-instructed adaptive grouping-scheduling strategy to allocate resources of AMAVs dynamically. TransformLoc achieves a collaborative, adaptive, and cost-effective localization system suitable for large-scale heterogeneous MAV swarms. We implement and validate TransformLoc on industrial drones. Results show it outperforms all baselines by up to 68% in localization performance, improving navigation success rates by 60%. Extensive robustness and ablation experiments further highlight superiority of its design.

The growing relevance of multi-agent systems has drawn increasing focus on communication-efficient filters for collaborative perception to alleviate the system's communication burden. While the event-triggered (ET) mechanism can improve communication efficiency in collaborative state estimation, an inevitable trade-off exists between estimation accuracy and communication cost in ET filters. This paper proposes a fast and accurate ET diffusion-based filter for real-time multi-agent collaborative target tracking, aiming to reduce the system's data transmission without compromise in tracking performance. The proposed filter achieves improved tracking accuracy, reduced data transmission, and accelerated convergence using an error-minimized ET cubature information filter (CIF) for local estimation, and a correlation-aware diffusion strategy for global fusion. The experimental results confirm the scalability of the proposed EDC-CIF algorithm and demonstrate its efficacy in simultaneously reducing estimation error and computation time while significantly enhancing communication efficiency.

A heterogeneous micro aerial vehicles (MAV) swarm consists of resource-intensive but expensive advanced MAVs (AMAVs) and resource-limited but cost-effective basic MAVs (BMAVs), offering opportunities in diverse fields. Accurate and real-time localization is crucial for MAV swarms, but current practices lack a low-cost, high-precision, and real-time solution, especially for lightweight BMAVs. We find an opportunity to accomplish the task by transforming AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures for BMAVs. However, turning this insight into a practical system is non-trivial due to challenges in location estimation with BMAVs’ unknown and diverse localization errors and resource allocation of AMAVs given coupled influential factors. This study proposes TransformLoc, a new framework that transforms AMAVs into mobile localization infrastructures, specifically designed for low-cost and resource- constrained BMAVs. We first design an error-aware joint location estimation model to perform intermittent joint location estimation for BMAVs and then design a proximity-driven adaptive grouping-scheduling strategy to allocate resources of AMAVs dynamically. TransformLoc achieves a collaborative, adaptive, and cost-effective localization system suitable for large-scale heterogeneous MAV swarms. We implement TransformLoc on industrial drones and validate its performance. Results show that TransformLoc outperforms baselines including SOTA up to 68% in localization performance, motivating up to 60% navigation success rate improvement.

Volunteer activity often undergoes unique transformations with the constant changes in society. The information behind volunteer data was created to enhance public welfare efficiently and boost governmental organization productivity. This research aims to utilize public transit systems for volunteer services, reducing inequality in volunteer service provision across different regions and improving overall service efficiency. We collected and processed large-scale data related to public transit and volunteer services, conducting in-depth analysis using data mining techniques and deep learning methods. Through LDA, we annotated a large amount of volunteer data, and via data analysis, discovered patterns related to population distribution, spatial distribution, and temporal distribution. Combining public transit data and the mined features, we propose a novel spatio-temporal embedding model based on the transformer architecture, which can effectively classify and predict the matching between volunteer service demands and public transit systems. Studying the coupling between volunteer services and transportation systems helps establish a new data-driven mindset, better utilize urban resources, and provide high-quality volunteer services to the public.

MAV (Micro Aerial Vehicle) requires landing on a docking platform for recharging during or after missions due to their limited energy capacity. Inspired by biological tactile sensing, we propose a proprioceptive sensing system that allows MAV to "touch", recognize, and locate the landing platform even when visual or other positioning systems are not functioning properly. We leverage a physical phenomenon: as the MAV approaches a beneath obstacle, it experiences attitude disturbances caused by the airflow generated by the rotor’s reflections from the ground. By employing traditional signal processing and learning-based techniques to analyze signals from the IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and motors, the MAV can sense the edges of the platform and further calculate the precise landing coordinates. With a power consumption of less than 40 mW, our system achieves an edge detection error of less than 2 cm and a landing success rate exceeding 90%.CCS CONCEPTS• Applied computing → Aerospace; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning approaches; • Computer systems organization → Sensors and actuators.

Although modern localization methods have achieved remarkable accuracy with various sensors, there are still some circumstances where only proprioceptive sensing works (Inertial Navigation). However, localization and navigation using only IMU sensors (costing less than $1000) still face significant challenges such as low accuracy and large cumulative errors when using traditional filter methods. Furthermore, AI-based approaches, while promising, often yield unpredictable and unreliable outputs. This paper proposes FormerReckoning, an inertial localization estimation framework for wheeled robotics that incorporates physical prompts into a Transformer framework to enhance translation estimation accuracy. Our tests show that FormerReckoning not only reduces mean translation errors to 0.72% but also surpasses all baseline models in performance, demonstrating its potential to provide reliable and precise localization in a cost-effective manner.

Event cameras excel in high-speed and high-dynamic-range scenarios but are highly sensitive to rain, which introduces significant noise while also revealing detailed rain features. This paper introduces a novel Event-based Rain-Background Decomposition Network that integrates Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). By "Distilling Rain," we reconstruct a rain-free background for downstream tasks, and by "Collecting Rain," we extract the physical characteristics of rain. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the network's effectiveness in both background reconstruction and rain modeling. This work extends the capabilities of event cameras by mitigating the adverse effects of rain while also leveraging rain-induced noise to extract valuable environmental data, enhancing their utility in both challenging weather conditions and detailed environmental analysis.

Drone-based rapid and accurate environmental edge detection is highly advantageous for tasks such as disaster relief and autonomous navigation. Current methods, using radar or cameras, raise deployment costs and burden lightweight drones with high computational demands. In this paper, we propose AirTouch, a system that transforms the ground effect from a stability "foe" in traditional flight control views, into a "friend" for accurate and efficient edge detection. Our key insight is that analyzing drone sensor readings and flight commands allows us to detect ground effect changes. Such changes typically indicate the drone flying over an edge, making this information valuable for edge detection. We approach this insight through theoretical analysis, algorithm design, and implementation, fully leveraging the ground effect as a new sensing modality without compromising drone flight stability, thereby achieving accurate and efficient scene edge detection. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our system achieves a high detection accuracy with mean detection distance errors of 0.051m, outperforming the baseline performance by 86%.