# Autonomous Aerial Robot for High-Speed Search and Intercept Applications

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05465 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05465/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Deep Drone Acrobatics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05768/) (2020)
- [CoSTAR: Instructing Collaborative Robots with Behavior Trees and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06145/) (2016)
- [Efficient Optical flow and Stereo Vision for Velocity Estimation and Obstacle Avoidance on an Autonomous Pocket Drone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06702/) (2016)
- [From Monocular SLAM to Autonomous Drone Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07835/) (2016)
- [Linear vs Nonlinear MPC for Trajectory Tracking Applied to Rotary Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09240/) (2016)
- [Aggressive Quadrotor Flight through Narrow Gaps with Onboard Sensing and Computing using Active Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00291/) (2016)
- [An Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation Platform for Contact-Based Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03502/) (2019)
- [Team NimbRo at MBZIRC 2017: Fast Landing on a Moving Target and Treasure Hunting with a Team of MAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05471/) (2018)
- [The ETH-MAV Team in the MBZ International Robotics Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08275/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, high-speed navigation and environment interaction in the context of aerial robotics has become a field of interest for several academic and industrial research studies. In particular, Search and Intercept (SaI) applications for aerial robots pose a compelling research area due to their potential usability in several environments. Nevertheless, SaI tasks involve a challenging development regarding sensory weight, on-board computation resources, actuation design and algorithms for perception and control, among others. In this work, a fully-autonomous aerial robot for high-speed object grasping has been proposed. As an additional sub-task, our system is able to autonomously pierce balloons located in poles close to the surface. Our first contribution is the design of the aerial robot at an actuation and sensory level consisting of a novel gripper design with additional sensors enabling the robot to grasp objects at high speeds. The second contribution is a complete software framework consisting of perception, state estimation, motion planning, motion control and mission control in order to rapid- and robustly perform the autonomous grasping mission. Our approach has been validated in a challenging international competition and has shown outstanding results, being able to autonomously search, follow and grasp a moving object at 6 m/s in an outdoor environment