Indoor UAV navigation faces significant challenges due to GPS signal absence and limitations of conventional visual-inertial systems under challenging lighting and motion conditions. This paper presents an event-based visual-inertial odometry system that addresses these limitations through intermediate frame reconstruction from event streams combined with established odometry algorithms. The approach leverages event cameras’ unique characteristics—microsecond temporal resolution, high dynamic range (120 dB), and motion blur immunity—to maintain stable navigation performance under conditions that cause conventional systems to fail. The system achieves real-time operation at 30 Hz frame reconstruction and 20 Hz pose estimation on embedded hardware, consuming 15 W power while adding only 50 g to the UAV platform. Experimental validation in controlled indoor environments demonstrates mean absolute pose errors of 26-42 cm across different operational conditions, comparable to conventional visual-inertial systems. Critically, the system maintains stable performance during rapid lighting transitions, showing only 59% performance degradation compared to baseline conditions, while conventional cameras typically experience complete tracking failure. The results establish event-based visual-inertial odometry as a viable alternative for indoor UAV navigation, particularly in applications requiring environmental robustness over marginal accuracy improvements under optimal conditions.

Autonomous exploration using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is essential for various tasks such as building inspections, rescue operations, deliveries, and warehousing. However, there are two main limitations to previous approaches: they may not be able to provide a complete map of the environment and assume that the map built during exploration is accurate enough for safe navigation, which is usually not the case. To address these limitations, a novel exploration method is proposed that combines frontier-based exploration with a collector strategy that achieves global exploration and complete map creation. In each iteration, the collector strategy stores and validates frontiers detected during exploration and selects the next best frontier to navigate to. The collector strategy ensures global exploration by balancing the exploitation of a known map with the exploration of unknown areas. In addition, the online path replanning ensures safe navigation through the map created during motion. The performance of the proposed method is verified by exploring 3D simulation environments in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, the proposed approach is validated in a real-world experiment.

This paper presents a methodology for mapping and localization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) based on the integration of sensors from different modalities. Particularly, we integrate distance estimations to Ultra-Wideband (UWB) sensors and 3D point-clouds from RGB-D sensors. First, a novel approach for environment mapping is introduced, exploiting the synergies between UWB sensors and point-clouds to produce a multi-modal 3D map that integrates the estimated UWB sensors position. This map is further integrated into a Monte Carlo Localization method to robustly estimate the UAV pose. Finally, the full approach is tested with real indoor flights and validated with a motion tracking system.

Actively articulated wheel-on-leg rovers offer high degrees of mobility for traversing unstructured and scientifically interesting terrain. An ability to actively conform to the terrain to increase traversability is sought. A kinematic model based on recursive kinematic propagation in combination with a terrain map generated online is used to solve desired limb articulation angles that meet operator defined rover body trajectories. This technique is validated in field tests on a Martian analog terrain.