drone manufacturers

Abstract: Existing high-speed navigation systems for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) commonly rely on depth cameras, stereo vision, or LiDAR to obtain explicit geometric information, while monocular cameras offer a lighter and lower-cost alternative. However, monocular flight remains challenging because RGB images offer no direct metric cues and visual appearance varies considerably across environments. We propose a geometry-aware monocular visual planning framework that predicts trajectories from two image frames, their relative pose, and the MAV state. Without explicitly reconstructing depth, the proposed method complements the downstream planning objective with feature-level geometric supervision by transferring the planning-relevant representation learned by a privileged depth expert to the RGB planner through cross-modal distillation. The framework first trains a depth-based geometric expert, then distills its planning features into a monocular branch using paired RGB-D observations, and finally adapts the planner to the downstream trajectory planning objective. This design encourages the policy to learn planning-relevant geometric features, enabling collision avoidance. We further use a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulator to render visual observations for data collection, paired RGB-D supervision, and simulation evaluation. The planner trained in simulation is then deployed in real-world environments without real-world fine-tuning, achieving obstacle avoidance at speeds of up to 6.5 m/s.

Abstract: Vision-based gesture control accepts commands from any hand in the camera field of view, which is unsafe in shared indoor spaces. This paper presents IGate, an identity-gated control stack that includes gesture control and face tracking, in which commands are admitted only when an enrolled operator is verified. The system performs few-shot user enrolment from 20 initial face frames, without prior user-specific training: verification compares an embedding of the current face crop against the enrolled template by cosine similarity, while face tracking uses proportional correction. Gesture control is achieved by classifying extracted hand landmarks using an RBF-SVM trained on a custom dataset. Additionally, a hierarchical finite-state machine handles mode selection, default, and fallback behaviours. The approach is tested on a DJI Tello EDU, each component evaluated offline and in-flight across 270 trials (149 flown). Face verification yields a 0.32% offline equal error rate versus 19.3% in-flight. Under hover-locked conditions, the RBF-SVM gesture classifier outperforms the geometric rule (0.850 vs. 0.651 accuracy), with 82% of this gap stemming from the depth channel. All logs and reproduction scripts will be released.

Abstract: Coaxial rotor drones have generated considerable interest because of energy efficiency and small size, but they are afflicted with inherent underactuation for roll and pitch control, although systems like swashplates have circumvented this limitation at the cost of greater mechanical complexity. This work presents a novel coaxial drone supplemented by a two-degreesof-freedom pendulum mechanism for active thrust vectoring that offers a less mechanically complicated alternative. We develop a comprehensive Lagrangian dynamic model that does not ignore the inertial contributions of all the components, including body, servo arms, and motor assembly. A Linear Quadratic Regulator(LQR) is designed based on the linearized dynamics around the hover equilibrium. High-fidelity simulations taking actuator dynamics and sensor noise into account validate the proposed architecture. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) blends GPS, barometer, and IMU estimates with high accuracy for state estimation. The findings verify the potential and reliability of this approach for power-saving, rapid coaxial UAVs.

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) extend embodied intelligence into continuous three-dimensional space, where perception, reasoning, physical embodiment, and action are tightly coupled through flight and environmental interaction. Recent advances in foundation models, world models, and AI agents are shifting UAV autonomy from task-specific perception and control toward systems that can interpret human intent, understand open environments, reason about physical consequences, and organize complex behaviors under embodiment and flight-dynamic constraints. We characterize this emerging paradigm as UAV embodied intelligence (UAV EI) and distinguish it from its system realization, the embodied-intelligent UAV (EI UAV). To provide a unified view of the field, we introduce a 5+5 framework that describes UAV EI through five capability dimensions and EI UAVs through five architectural layers spanning physical embodiment, general cognition, embodied skills, external interaction, and system harnessing. Based on this framework, we systematically review recent progress in embodied morphology, embodied perception, world models, embodied planning, vision-language navigation, embodied manipulation, and embodied collaboration. We further identify long-horizon autonomy, predictive physical reasoning, test-time skill acquisition, and autonomous capability evolution as key challenges toward more general aerial embodied intelligence. Finally, we argue that harnessing physical-digital AI agents, through persistent coupling of digital intelligence with physical sensing, dynamics, action, and feedback, provides a system-level pathway toward adaptive and continuously evolving UAV autonomy. Project resources are available at our project website and GitHub repository.