Visually Guided Balloon Popping with an Autonomous MAV at MBZIRC 2020

TL;DR

This paper presents a fully autonomous MAV capable of real-time perception and balloon popping using onboard sensing, demonstrated successfully in the MBZIRC 2020 competition with rapid and resilient performance.

Contribution

The authors developed a fully autonomous MAV system that relies solely on onboard sensing and computing for balloon popping, achieving competitive results in a major robotics challenge.

Findings

Successfully popped all balloons in under two minutes in competition

Demonstrated resilience and speed in real-world experiments

Achieved autonomous operation with onboard sensing and computation

Abstract

Visually guided control of micro aerial vehicles (MAV) demands for robust real-time perception, fast trajectory generation, and a capable flight platform. We present a fully autonomous MAV that is able to pop balloons, relying only on onboard sensing and computing. The system is evaluated with real robot experiments during the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020 where it showed its resilience and speed. In all three competition runs we were able to pop all five balloons in less than two minutes flight time with a single MAV.