Yuchen Cui

dblp:201/5416 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
16ranked-venue papers
5as first author
12since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-7417-1222ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 14 · 5 first-author · 12 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 6 · 2 first-author · 4 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 3 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021Computer networks · 1Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 DiSCo: Diffusion Sequence Copilots for Shared Autonomy
abstract
Shared autonomy combines human user and AI copilot actions to control complex systems such as robotic arms. When a task is challenging, requires high dimensional control, or is subject to corruption, shared autonomy can significantly increase task performance by using a trained copilot to effectively correct user actions in a manner consistent with the user’s goals. To significantly improve the performance of shared autonomy, we introduce Diffusion Sequence Copilots (DiSCo): a method of shared autonomy with diffusion policy that plans action sequences consistent with past user actions. DiSCo seeds and inpaints the diffusion process with user-provided actions with hyperparameters to balance conformity to expert actions, alignment with user intent, and perceived responsiveness. We demonstrate that DiSCo substantially improves task performance in simulated driving and robotic arm tasks. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/disco-shared-autonomy/
Xu Yan 0007, Brandon McMahan, Michael Zhou, Yuyang Yuan, Johannes Y. Lee, Ali Shreif, Matthew Li, Zhenghao Peng, Bolei Zhou, Yuchen Cui, Jonathan C. Kao
HRI11
2025 Statistical Guarantees for Lifelong Reinforcement Learning using PAC-Bayes Theory
abstract
Lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) has been developed as a paradigm for extending single-task RL to more realistic, dynamic settings. In lifelong RL, the "life" of an RL agent is modeled as a stream of tasks drawn from a task distribution. We propose EPIC (Empirical PAC-Bayes that Improves Continuously), a novel algorithm designed for lifelong RL using PAC-Bayes theory. EPIC learns a shared policy distribution, referred to as the world policy, which enables rapid adaptation to new tasks while retaining valuable knowledge from previous experiences. Our theoretical analysis establishes a relationship between the algorithm’s generalization performance and the number of prior tasks preserved in memory. We also derive the sample complexity of EPIC in terms of RL regret. Extensive experiments on a variety of environments demonstrate that EPIC significantly outperforms existing methods in lifelong RL, offering both theoretical guarantees and practical efficacy through the use of the world policy.
Zhi Zhang 0012, Chris Chow, Yasi Zhang, Yanchao Sun, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Han Liu 0001, Furong Huang, Yuchen Cui, Oscar Hernan Madrid Padilla
AISTATS9
2025 Shared Autonomy for Proximal Teaching
abstract
Motor skills education often requires experienced professionals who can provide personalized instruction. Unfortu-nately, the availability of high-quality training can be limited for specialized tasks, such as high performance racing. Several recent works have proposed AI -assistance for motor skills instruction, ranging from rehabilitation to surgical robot tele-operation. However, these works often make simplifying assumptions on the student learning process, and fail to model how a teacher's assistance interacts with different individuals' abilities when determining optimal teaching strategies. Inspired by the idea of scaffolding from educational psychology, we leverage shared autonomy, a framework for combining user inputs with robot autonomy, to aid with curriculum design. Our key insight is that the way a student's behavior improves in the presence of assistance from an autonomous agent can highlight which sub-skills might be most “learnable” for the student, or within their Zone of Proximal Development. We use this to design Z-COACH, a method for using shared autonomy to provide personalized instruction targeting interpretable task sub-skills. In a user study$(\mathrm{n}=50)$, where we teach high performance racing in a simulated environment of the Thunderhill Raceway Park with the CARLA Autonomous Driving simulator, we show that Z-COACH helps identify which skills each student should first practice, leading to an overall improvement in driving time, behavior, and smoothness. Our work shows that increasingly available semi-autonomous capabilities (e.g. in vehicles, robots) can not only assist human users, but also help teach them.
Megha Srivastava, Reihaneh Iranmanesh, Yuchen Cui, Deepak Edakkattil Gopinath, Emily S. Sumner, Andrew Silva, Laporsha Dees, Guy Rosman, Dorsa Sadigh
HRI3
2025 How to Train Your Robots? The Impact of Demonstration Modality on Imitation Learning
abstract
Imitation learning is a promising approach for learning robot policies with user-provided data. The way demonstrations are provided, i.e., demonstration modality, influences the quality of the data. While existing research shows that kinesthetic teaching (physically guiding the robot) is preferred by users for the intuitiveness and ease of use, the majority of existing manipulation datasets were collected through teleoperation via a VR controller or spacemouse. In this work, we investigate how different demonstration modalities impact downstream learning performance as well as user experience. Specifically, we compare low-cost demonstration modalities including kinesthetic teaching, teleoperation with a VR controller, and teleoperation with a spacemouse controller. We experiment with three table-top manipulation tasks with different motion constraints. We evaluate and compare imitation learning performance using data from different demonstration modalities, and collected subjective feedback on user experience. Our results show that kinesthetic teaching is rated the most intuitive for controlling the robot and provides cleanest data for best downstream learning performance. However, it is not preferred as the way for large-scale data collection due to the physical load. Based on such insight, we propose a simple data collection scheme that relies on a small number of kinesthetic demonstrations mixed with data collected through teleoperation to achieve the best overall learning performance while maintaining low data-collection effort.
Haozhuo Li, Yuchen Cui, Dorsa Sadigh
ICRA2
2024 Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models : Open X-Embodiment Collaboration
abstract
Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train "generalist" X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. The project website is robotics-transformer-x.github.io.
Abigail O'Neill, Abhiram Maddukuri, Abhishek Gupta 0004, Abhishek Padalkar, Abraham Lee, Acorn Pooley, Agrim Gupta, Ajay Mandlekar, Ajinkya Jain, Albert Tung, Alex Bewley, Alex Irpan, Alexander Khazatsky, Anant Rai, Anchit Gupta, Andrew E. Wang, Anikait Singh, Animesh Garg, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Annie Xie, Anthony Brohan, Antonin Raffin, Archit Sharma, Arefeh Yavary, Arhan Jain, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ayzaan Wahid, Ben Burgess-Limerick, Bernhard Schölkopf, Blake Wulfe, Brian Ichter, Cewu Lu, Charles Xu 0003, Charlotte Le, Chelsea Finn, Chen Wang 0053, Chenfeng Xu, Cheng Chi 0001, Chenguang Huang, Christine Chan, Christopher Agia, Chuer Pan, Chuyuan Fu, Coline Devin, Danfei Xu, Daniel Morton, Danny Drieß, Daphne Chen, Deepak Pathak, Dhruv Shah, Dieter Büchler, Dinesh Jayaraman, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Dorsa Sadigh, Edward Johns, Ethan Paul Foster, Fangchen Liu, Federico Ceola, Fei Xia 0002, Feiyu Zhao, Freek Stulp, Gaoyue Zhou, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Gautam Salhotra, Gilbert Feng, Giulio Schiavi, Glen Berseth, Gregory Kahn, Guanzhi Wang, Hao Su 0001, Haoshu Fang, Henghui Bao, Heni Ben Amor, Henrik I. Christensen, Hiroki Furuta, Homer Walke, Hongjie Fang, Huy Ha, Igor Mordatch, Ilija Radosavovic, Isabel Leal, Jacky Liang, Jad Abou-Chakra, Jaehyung Kim 0001, Jaimyn Drake, Jan Peters 0001, Jan Schneider 0007, Jasmine Hsu, Jeannette Bohg, Jeffrey T. Bingham, Jensen Gao, Jiaheng Hu, Jiajun Wu 0001, Jiankai Sun, Jianlan Luo, Jiayuan Gu, Jie Tan 0001, Jihoon Oh, Jimmy Wu, Jingpei Lu, Jitendra Malik, João Silvério, Joey Hejna, Jonathan Booher, Jonathan Tompson, Jonathan Yang, Jordi Salvador, Joseph J. Lim, Junhyek Han, Kanishka Rao, Karl Pertsch, Karol Hausman, Keegan Go, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Kenneth Y. Goldberg, Kendra Byrne, Kenneth Oslund, Kento Kawaharazuka, Kevin Black, Kevin Zhang 0002, Kiana Ehsani, Kiran Lekkala, Kirsty Ellis, Krishan Rana, Krishnan Srinivasan, Kuan Fang, Kunal Pratap Singh, Kuo-Hao Zeng, Kyle Hatch, Kyle Hsu, Laurent Itti, Yunliang Chen 0001, Lerrel Pinto, Li Fei-Fei 0001, Liam Tan, Linxi Fan, Lionel Ott, Lisa Lee, Luca Weihs, Magnum Chen, Marion Lepert, Marius Memmel, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Masha Itkina, Mateo Guaman Castro, Max Spero, Maximilian Du, Michael Ahn, Michael C. Yip, Mingtong Zhang 0003, Mingyu Ding, Minho Heo, Mohan Kumar Srirama, Mohit Sharma 0001, Moo Jin Kim, Naoaki Kanazawa, Nicklas Hansen 0001, Nicolas Heess, Nikhil J. Joshi, Niko Sünderhauf, Norman Di Palo, Nur Muhammad Shafiullah, Oier Mees, Oliver Kroemer, Osbert Bastani, Pannag R. Sanketi, Patrick Tree Miller, Patrick Yin, Paul Wohlhart, Peng Xu 0010, Peter David Fagan, Peter Mitrano, Pierre Sermanet, Pieter Abbeel, Priya Sundaresan, Qiuyu Chen, Rafael Rafailov, Ria Doshi, Roberto Martin Martin, Rohan Baijal, Rosario Scalise, Rose Hendrix, Roy Lin, Runjia Qian, Russell Mendonca, Rutav Shah, Ryan Hoque, Ryan Julian, Samuel Bustamante-Gomez, Sean Kirmani, Sergey Levine, Sherry Moore, Shikhar Bahl, Shivin Dass, Shubham D. Sonawani, Shuran Song, Sichun Xu, Siddhant Haldar, Siddharth Karamcheti, Simeon Adebola, Simon Guist, Soroush Nasiriany, Stefan Schaal, Stefan Welker, Stephen Tian, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Sudeep Dasari, Suneel Belkhale, Sungjae Park, Suraj Nair 0003, Suvir Mirchandani, Takayuki Osa, Tanmay Gupta, Tatsuya Harada, Tatsuya Matsushima, Ted Xiao, Thomas Kollar, Tianhe Yu, Tianli Ding, Todor Davchev, Tony Z. Zhao, Travis Armstrong, Trevor Darrell, Trinity Chung, Vidhi Jain, Vincent Vanhoucke, Wolfram Burgard, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Xinghao Zhu, Xinyang Geng, Liangwei Xu, Yecheng Jason Ma 0001, Yejin Kim 0003, Yevgen Chebotar, Yilin Wu 0003, Yonatan Bisk, Yoonyoung Cho, Youngwoon Lee, Yuchen Cui, Yueh-Hua Wu, Yujin Tang, Yuke Zhu, Yunchu Zhang, Yunfan Jiang 0001, Yunshuang Li, Yunzhu Li, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Zehan Ma, Zichen Jeff Cui, Zichen Zhang 0016, Zipeng Lin
ICRA264
2024 Distilling and Retrieving Generalizable Knowledge for Robot Manipulation via Language Corrections
abstract
Today’s robot policies exhibit subpar performance when faced with the challenge of generalizing to novel environments. Human corrective feedback is a crucial form of guidance to enable such generalization. However, adapting to and learning from online human corrections is a non-trivial endeavor: not only do robots need to remember human feedback over time to retrieve the right information in new settings and reduce the intervention rate, but also they would need to be able to respond to feedback that can be arbitrary corrections about high-level human preferences to low-level adjustments to skill parameters. In this work, we present Distillation and Retrieval of Online Corrections (DROC), a large language model (LLM)-based system that can respond to arbitrary forms of language feedback, distill generalizable knowledge from corrections, and retrieve relevant past experiences based on textual and visual similarity for improving performance in novel settings. DROC is able to respond to a sequence of online language corrections that address failures in both high-level task plans and low-level skill primitives. We demonstrate that DROC effectively distills the relevant information from the sequence of online corrections in a knowledge base and retrieves that knowledge in settings with new task or object instances. DROC outperforms other techniques that directly generate robot code via LLMs [1] by using only half of the total number of corrections needed in the first round and requires little to no corrections after two iterations. We show further results and videos on our project website: https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/droc.
Lihan Zha, Yuchen Cui, Li-Heng Lin, Minae Kwon, Montse Gonzalez Arenas, Andy Zeng 0001, Fei Xia 0002, Dorsa Sadigh
ICRA2
2023 No, to the Right: Online Language Corrections for Robotic Manipulation via Shared Autonomy
abstract
Systems for language-guided human-robot interaction must satisfy two key desiderata for broad adoption: adaptivity and learning efficiency. Unfortunately, existing instruction-following agents cannot adapt, lacking the ability to incorporate online natural language supervision, and even if they could, require hundreds of demonstrations to learn even simple policies. In this work, we address these problems by presenting Language-Informed Latent Actions with Corrections (LILAC), a framework for incorporating and adapting to natural language corrections "to the right", or "no, towards the book" - online, during execution. We explore rich manipulation domains within a shared autonomy paradigm. Instead of discrete turn-taking between a human and robot, LILAC splits agency between the human and robot: language is an input to a learned model that produces a meaningful, low-dimensional control space that the human can use to guide the robot. Each real-time correction refines the human's control space, enabling precise, extended behaviors - with the added benefit of requiring only a handful of demonstrations to learn. We evaluate our approach via a user study where users work with a Franka Emika Panda manipulator to complete complex manipulation tasks. Compared to existing learned baselines covering both open-loop instruction following and single-turn shared autonomy, we show that our corrections-aware approach obtains higher task completion rates, and is subjectively preferred by users because of its reliability, precision, and ease of use.
Yuchen Cui, Siddharth Karamcheti, Raj Palleti, Nidhya Shivakumar, Percy Liang, Dorsa Sadigh
HRI1
2023 Masked Imitation Learning: Discovering Environment-Invariant Modalities in Multimodal Demonstrations
abstract
Multimodal demonstrations provide robots with an abundance of information to make sense of the world. However, such abundance may not always lead to good performance when it comes to learning sensorimotor control policies from human demonstrations. Extraneous data modalities can lead to state over-specification, where the state contains modalities that are not only useless for decision-making but also can change data distribution across environments. State over-specification leads to issues such as the learned policy not generalizing outside of the training data distribution. In this work, we propose Masked Imitation Learning (MIL) to address state over-specification by selectively using informative modalities. Specifically, we design a masked policy network with a binary mask to block certain modalities. We develop a bi-level optimization algorithm that learns this mask to accurately filter over-specified modalities. We demonstrate empirically that MIL outperforms baseline algorithms in simulated domains and effectively recovers the environment-invariant modalities on a multimodal dataset collected on a real robot. Videos and supplemental details are at: https://tinyurl.com/masked-il
Yilun Hao, Ruinan Wang, Zhangjie Cao, Yuchen Cui, Dorsa Sadigh
IROS5
2023 Data Quality in Imitation Learning
abstract
In supervised learning, the question of data quality and curation has been sidelined in recent years in favor of increasingly more powerful and expressive models that can ingest internet-scale data. However, in offline learning for robotics, we simply lack internet scale data, and so high quality datasets are a necessity. This is especially true in imitation learning (IL), a sample efficient paradigm for robot learning using expert demonstrations. Policies learned through IL suffer from state distribution shift at test time due to compounding errors in action prediction, which leads to unseen states that the policy cannot recover from. Instead of designing new algorithms to address distribution shift, an alternative perspective is to develop new ways of assessing and curating datasets. There is growing evidence that the same IL algorithms can have substantially different performance across different datasets. This calls for a formalism for defining metrics of "data quality" that can further be leveraged for data curation. In this work, we take the first step toward formalizing data quality for imitation learning through the lens of distribution shift: a high quality dataset encourages the policy to stay in distribution at test time. We propose two fundamental properties that are necessary for a high quality datasets: i) action divergence: the mismatch between the expert and learned policy at certain states; and ii) transition diversity: the noise present in the system for a given state and action. We investigate the combined effect of these two key properties in imitation learning theoretically, and we empirically analyze models trained on a variety of different data sources. We show that state diversity is not always beneficial, and we demonstrate how action divergence and transition diversity interact in practice.
Suneel Belkhale, Yuchen Cui, Dorsa Sadigh
NeurIPS2
2023 Contribution-based Test Case Reduction Strategy for Mutation-based Fault Localization (S)
abstract
Fault localization is one of the most expensive steps during software debugging.Mutation-based Fault Localization (MBFL) is a promising technique but with a high computational cost since the large mutation execution on mutation analysis.Previous studies mainly reduce the cost of decreasing the number of mutants and optimizing the process execution, such kinds of strategies have shown promising results.However, reducing the cost of MBFL by decreasing the number of test cases is also effective.In this paper, we propose a Contribution-Based Test Case Reduction (CBTCR) strategy for improving the efficiency of MBFL.CBTCR first measures the contribution value of each test case and then selects the test cases according to the value.Then it takes the reduced test suite for executing the mutants.We evaluate CBTCR on 383 real software faults from the Defects4J benchmark.The results show that CBTCR outperforms the other MBFL test case reduction strategies (e.g., FTMES, IETCR) in terms of the Top-N and MAP metrics.Also, CBTCR can significantly reduce 85.43% of the cost on average while maintaining a similar accuracy to original MBFL techniques.
Xiangnan Zhao, Yuchen Cui
SEKE4
2021 Demonstration of the EMPATHIC Framework for Task Learning from Implicit Human Feedback
abstract
Reactions such as gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations are an abundant, naturally occurring channel of information that humans provide during interactions. An agent could leverage an understanding of such implicit human feedback to improve its task performance at no cost to the human. This approach contrasts with common agent teaching methods based on demonstrations, critiques, or other guidance that need to be attentively and intentionally provided. In this work, we demonstrate a novel data-driven framework for learning from implicit human feedback, EMPATHIC. This two-stage method consists of (1) mapping implicit human feedback to relevant task statistics such as reward, optimality, and advantage; and (2) using such a mapping to learn a task. We instantiate the first stage and three second-stage evaluations of the learned mapping. To do so, we collect a dataset of human facial reactions while participants observe an agent execute a sub-optimal policy for a prescribed training task. We train a deep neural network on this data and demonstrate its ability to (1) infer relative reward ranking of events in the training task from prerecorded human facial reactions; (2) improve the policy of an agent in the training task using live human facial reactions; and (3) transfer to a novel domain in which it evaluates robot manipulation trajectories. In the video, we focus on demonstrating the online learning capability of our instantiation of EMPATHIC.
Yuchen Cui, Qiping Zhang, Sahil Jain, Alessandro Allievi, Peter Stone 0001, Scott Niekum, W. Bradley Knox
AAAI1
2021 Understanding the Relationship between Interactions and Outcomes in Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning
abstract
Human-in-the-loop Machine Learning (HIL-ML) is a widely adopted paradigm for instilling human knowledge in autonomous agents. Many design choices influence the efficiency and effectiveness of such interactive learning processes, particularly the interaction type through which the human teacher may provide feedback. While different interaction types (demonstrations, preferences, etc.) have been proposed and evaluated in the HIL-ML literature, there has been little discussion of how these compare or how they should be selected to best address a particular learning problem. In this survey, we propose an organizing principle for HIL-ML that provides a way to analyze the effects of interaction types on human performance and training data. We also identify open problems in understanding the effects of interaction types.
Yuchen Cui, Pallavi Koppol, Henny Admoni, Scott Niekum, Reid G. Simmons, Aaron Steinfeld, Tesca Fitzgerald
IJCAI1
2019 Uncertainty-Aware Data Aggregation for Deep Imitation Learning
abstract
Estimating statistical uncertainties allows autonomous agents to communicate their confidence during task execution and is important for applications in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving. In this work, we present the uncertainty-aware imitation learning (UAIL) algorithm for improving end-to-end control systems via data aggregation. UAIL applies Monte Carlo Dropout to estimate uncertainty in the control output of end-to-end systems, using states where it is uncertain to selectively acquire new training data. In contrast to prior data aggregation algorithms that force human experts to visit sub-optimal states at random, UAIL can anticipate its own mistakes and switch control to the expert in order to prevent visiting a series of sub-optimal states. Our experimental results from simulated driving tasks demonstrate that our proposed uncertainty estimation method can be leveraged to reliably predict infractions. Our analysis shows that UAIL outperforms existing data aggregation algorithms on a series of benchmark tasks.
Yuchen Cui, David Isele, Scott Niekum, Kikuo Fujimura
ICRA1
2018 Active Reward Learning from Critiques
abstract
Learning from demonstration algorithms, such as Inverse Reinforcement Learning, aim to provide a natural mechanism for programming robots, but can often require a prohibitive number of demonstrations to capture important subtleties of a task. Rather than requesting additional demonstrations blindly, active learning methods leverage uncertainty to query the user for action labels at states with high expected information gain. However, this approach can still require a large number of labels to adequately reduce uncertainty and may also be unintuitive, as users are not accustomed to determining optimal actions in a single out-of-context state. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel trajectory-based active Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning algorithm that (1) queries the user forcritiquesof automatically generated trajectories, rather than asking for demonstrations or action labels, (2) utilizestrajectory segmentationto expedite the critique / labeling process, and (3) predicts the user's critiques to generate the most highly informative trajectory queries. We evaluated our algorithm in simulated domains, finding it to compare favorably to prior work and a randomized baseline.
Yuchen Cui, Scott Niekum
ICRA1
2018 Modeling sensory-motor decisions in natural behavior
abstract
Although a standard reinforcement learning model can capture many aspects of reward-seeking behaviors, it may not be practical for modeling human natural behaviors because of the richness of dynamic environments and limitations in cognitive resources. We propose a modular reinforcement learning model that addresses these factors. Based on this model, a modular inverse reinforcement learning algorithm is developed to estimate both the rewards and discount factors from human behavioral data, which allows predictions of human navigation behaviors in virtual reality with high accuracy across different subjects and with different tasks. Complex human navigation trajectories in novel environments can be reproduced by an artificial agent that is based on the modular model. This model provides a strategy for estimating the subjective value of actions and how they influence sensory-motor decisions in natural behavior.
Matthew H. Tong, Yuchen Cui, Constantin A. Rothkopf, Dana H. Ballard, Mary M. Hayhoe
PLoS Comput. Biol.4
2017 Indoor Follow Me Drone
abstract
With the availability of inexpensive and powerful drones, it is possible to let drones automatically follow a user for video taping. This can not only reduce cost, but also support video taping in situations where otherwise not possible (e.g., during private moments or at inconvenient locations like indoor rock climbing). While there have been many follow-me drones on the market for outdoors, which rely on GPS, enabling indoor follow-me function is more challenging due to the lack of an effective approach to track users in indoor environments. To this end, we develop a holistic system that lets a mobile phone carried by a user accurately track the drone's relative location and control it to maintain a specified distance and orientation for automatic video taping. We develop a series of techniques to (i) track a drone's location using acoustic signals with sub-centimeter errors even under strong propeller noise from the drone and complicated multipath in indoor environments, and (ii) solve practical challenges in applying model predictive control (MPC) framework to control the drone. The latter consists of developing measurement-based flight models, designing measurement techniques to provide feedback to the controller, and predicting the user's movement. We implement our system on AR Drone 2.0 and Samsung S7. The extensive evaluation shows that our drone can follow a user effectively and maintain a specified following distance and orientation within 2-3 cm and 1-3 degree errors, respectively. The videos taped by the drone during flight are smooth according to the jerk metric.
Wenguang Mao, Zaiwei Zhang, Lili Qiu, Jian He 0002, Yuchen Cui, Sangki Yun
MobiSys5