BatMobility: Towards Flying Without Seeing for Autonomous Drones

TL;DR

BatMobility introduces a radar-only perception system for UAVs, enabling autonomous flight without optical sensors, effective in challenging conditions, and comparable or superior to traditional optical systems.

Contribution

This work presents BatMobility, the first lightweight mmWave radar-based perception system for UAVs that replaces optical sensors for autonomous navigation.

Findings

Achieves real-time radar-based perception on off-the-shelf quadcopters.

Performs comparably or better than optical sensors in various scenarios.

Enables UAV flight in conditions where optical sensors fail.

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on optical sensors such as cameras and lidar for autonomous operation. However, such optical sensors are error-prone in bad lighting, inclement weather conditions including fog and smoke, and around textureless or transparent surfaces. In this paper, we ask: is it possible to fly UAVs without relying on optical sensors, i.e., can UAVs fly without seeing? We present BatMobility, a lightweight mmWave radar-only perception system for UAVs that eliminates the need for optical sensors. BatMobility enables two core functionalities for UAVs -- radio flow estimation (a novel FMCW radar-based alternative for optical flow based on surface-parallel doppler shift) and radar-based collision avoidance. We build BatMobility using commodity sensors and deploy it as a real-time system on a small off-the-shelf quadcopter running an unmodified flight controller. Our evaluation shows that BatMobility achieves comparable or better performance than commercial-grade optical sensors across a wide range of scenarios.