REFLEX: A Learned On-Board Reflex for Robust Autonomous Collision Recovery of Soft Quadrotors
Abstract: Collision-resilient airframes allow quadrotors to survive impacts, but do not ensure autonomous post-collision recovery. Innovation gating in stock onboard estimators often rejects valid external velocity measurements after high-speed impacts, compromising recovery. We present REFLEX, a collision-recovery flight mode that runs entirely on the flight controller, requiring neither contact sensors nor a companion computer. Its proprioceptive recurrent policy stabilizes the vehicle without position, velocity, heading, or altitude estimates. The translational estimate is reinitialized while REFLEX is active, and a trust gate checks estimator consistency before returning control to the stock autopilot. The policy is trained in simulation using proximal policy optimization, with episodes initialized from post-impact states measured in 47 real collisions. In hardware experiments, REFLEX recovered 19 of 22 wall impacts at 5.03 $\pm$ 0.09 m/s, compared with 1 of 14 for the matched stock autopilot. These included 15 consecutive recoveries in a single flight. A separate exploratory flight demonstrated two additional recoveries at 6.02 and 6.05 m/s within the same flight, exceeding the previously reported velocity for autonomous wall-collision recovery by 64%.