Active Contact Engagement for Aerial Navigation in Unknown Environments with Glass

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid sensor-contact approach for autonomous aerial robots to reliably detect and navigate around transparent glass obstacles in unknown environments, enhancing robustness and efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel system combining visual detection and active touch-based confirmation for glass obstacle detection in aerial navigation.

Findings

Effective detection of glass obstacles in real-world scenarios.

Improved navigation robustness around transparent obstacles.

Real-time map updating and trajectory replanning capabilities.

Abstract

Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and passive contact-resilient aerial vehicle designs to detect glass surfaces, which are often limited in terms of robustness and efficiency. In this work, we propose a novel approach for robust autonomous aerial navigation in unknown environments with transparent glass obstacles, combining the strengths of both sensor-based and contact-based glass detection. The proposed system begins with the incremental detection and information maintenance about potential glass surfaces using visual sensor measurements. The vehicle then actively engages in touch actions with the visually detected potential glass surfaces using a pair of lightweight contact-sensing modules to confirm or invalidate their presence. Following this, the volumetric map is efficiently updated with the glass surface information and safe trajectories are replanned on the fly to circumvent the glass obstacles. We validate the proposed system through real-world experiments in various scenarios, demonstrating its effectiveness in enabling efficient and robust autonomous aerial navigation in complex real-world environments with glass obstacles.