Multi-robot localization is a crucial task for implementing multi-robot systems. Numerous researchers have proposed optimization-based multi-robot localization methods that use camera, IMU, and UWB sensors. Nevertheless, characteristics of individual robot odometry estimates and distance measurements between robots used in the optimization are not sufficiently considered. In addition, previous researches were heavily influenced by the odometry accuracy that is estimated from individual robots. Consequently, long-term drift error caused by error accumulation is potentially inevitable. In this paper, we propose a novel visual-inertial-range-based multi-robot localization method, named SaWa-ML, which enables geometric structure-aware pose correction and weight adaptation-based robust multi-robot localization. Our contributions are twofold: (i) we leverage UWB sensor data, whose range error does not accumulate over time, to first estimate the relative positions between robots and then correct the positions of each robot, thus reducing long-term drift errors, (ii) we design adaptive weights for robot pose correction by considering the characteristics of the sensor data and visual-inertial odometry estimates. The proposed method has been validated in real-world experiments, showing a substantial performance increase compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.

Depth information which specifies the distance between objects and current position of the robot is essential for many robot tasks such as navigation. Recently, researchers have proposed depth completion frameworks to provide dense depth maps that offer comprehensive information about the surrounding environment. However, existing methods show significant trade-offs between computational efficiency and accuracy during inference. The substantial memory and computational requirements make them unsuitable for real-time applications, highlighting the need to improve the completeness and accuracy of depth information while improving processing speed to enhance robot performance in various tasks. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose CHADET (cross-hierarchical-attention depth-completion transformer), a lightweight depth-completion network that can generate accurate dense depth maps from RGB images and sparse depth points. For each pair, its feature is extracted from the depthwise blocks and passed to the equally lightweight transformer-based decoder. In the decoder, we utilize the novel cross-hierarchical-attention module that refines the image features from the depth information. Our approach improves the quality and reduces memory usage of the depth map prediction, as validated in both KITTI, NYUv2, and VOID datasets.

Multirotors can be effectively applied to various tasks, such as transportation, investigation, exploration, and lifesaving, depending on the type of payload. However, due to the nature of multirotors, the payload loaded on the multirotor is limited in its position and weight, which presents a major disadvantage when the multirotor is used in various fields. In this paper, we propose a novel method that greatly improves the restrictions on payload position and weight using a morphing quadrotor system. Our method can estimate the drone’s weight, center of gravity position, and inertia tensor in real-time, which change depending on payload, and determine the optimal morphology for efficient and stable flight. An adaptive control method that can reflect the change in flight dynamics by payload and morphing is also presented. Experiments were conducted to confirm that the proposed morphing quadrotor improves the stability and efficiency in various situations of transporting payloads compared with the conventional quadrotor systems.

Recently, needs for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are attachable to the wall have been highlighted. As one of the ways to address the need, researches on various tilting multirotors that can increase maneuverability has been employed. Unfortunately, existing studies on the tilting multirotors require considerable amounts of prior information on the complex dynamic model. Meanwhile, reinforcement learning on quadrotors has been studied to mitigate this issue. Yet, these are only been applied to standard quadrotors, whose systems are less complex than those of tilting multirotors. In this paper, a novel reinforcement learning-based method is proposed to control a tilting multirotor on real-world applications, which is the first attempt to apply reinforcement learning to a tilting multirotor. To do so, we propose a novel reward function for a neural network model that takes power efficiency into account. The model is initially trained over a simulated environment and then fine-tuned using real-world data in order to overcome the sim-to-real gap issue. Furthermore, a novel, efficient state representation with respect to the goal frame that helps the network learn optimal policy better is proposed. As verified on real-world experiments, our proposed method shows robust controllability by overcoming the complex dynamics of tilting multirotors.