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.
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This content will become publicly available on June 3, 2025
Radarize: Enhancing Radar SLAM with Generalizable Doppler-Based Odometry
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar is increasingly being considered as an alternative to optical sensors for robotic primitives like simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). While mmWave radar overcomes some limitations of optical sensors, such as occlusions, poor lighting conditions, and privacy concerns, it also faces unique challenges, such as missed obstacles due to specular reflections or fake objects due to multipath. To address these challenges, we propose Radarize, a self-contained SLAM pipeline that uses only a commodity single-chip mmWave radar. Our radar-native approach uses techniques such as Doppler shift-based odometry and multipath artifact suppression to improve performance. We evaluate our method on a large dataset of 146 trajectories spanning 4 buildings and mounted on 3 different platforms, totaling approximately 4.7 Km of travel distance. Our results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art radar and radar inertial approaches by approximately 5x in terms of odometry and 8x in terms of end-to end SLAM, as measured by absolute trajectory error (ATE), without the need for additional sensors such as IMUs or wheel encoders.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2148583
- PAR ID:
- 10521355
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM MobiSys 2024
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400705816
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 331 to 344
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Minato-ku, Tokyo Japan
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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