# Ultra-High-Frequency Harmony: mmWave Radar and Event Camera Orchestrate Accurate Drone Landing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14992/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [Event-based Moving Object Detection and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04523/) (2018)
- [Distant Vehicle Detection Using Radar and Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10951/) (2019)
- [See Through Smoke: Robust Indoor Mapping with Low-cost mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00398/) (2019)
- [An Asynchronous Kalman Filter for Hybrid Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05590/) (2020)
- [A New Wave in Robotics: Survey on Recent mmWave Radar Applications in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01135/) (2023)
- [Microsaccade-inspired Event Camera for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17769/) (2024)
- [Eye in the Sky: Drone-Based Object Tracking and 3D Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08259/) (2019)
- [Fusing Event-based Camera and Radar for SLAM Using Spiking Neural Networks with Continual STDP Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04236/) (2022)
- [Path Generation for Wheeled Robots Autonomous Navigation on Vegetated Terrain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08977/) (2023)
- [Towards High-Speed Passive Visible Light Communication with Event Cameras and Digital Micro-Mirrors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14228/) (2024)
- [AdaptSLAM: Edge-Assisted Adaptive SLAM with Resource Constraints via Uncertainty Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04620/) (2023)
- [TransformLoc: Transforming MAVs into Mobile Localization Infrastructures in Heterogeneous Swarms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08815/) (2024)
- [Vital Sign Monitoring in Dynamic Environment via mmWave Radar and Camera Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11057/) (2023)
- [BatMobility: Towards Flying Without Seeing for Autonomous Drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11518/) (2023)
- [Soar: Design and Deployment of A Smart Roadside Infrastructure System for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13786/) (2024)
- [LVCP: LiDAR-Vision Tightly Coupled Collaborative Real-time Relative Positioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10782/) (2024)
- [mmHawkeye: Passive UAV Detection with a COTS mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06479/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Analysis and Design of a Drone Flight Controller](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05802/) (2018)
- [GPSMirror: Expanding Accurate GPS Positioning to Shadowed and Indoor Regions with Backscatter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07572/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [AirScape: An Aerial Generative World Model with Motion Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08885/) (2025)
- [Event Camera Meets Mobile Embodied Perception: Abstraction, Algorithm, Acceleration, Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22943/) (2025)
- [PRE-Mamba: A 4D State Space Model for Ultra-High-Frequent Event Camera Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05307/) (2025)
- [JuggleRL: Mastering Ball Juggling with a Quadrotor via Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24892/) (2025)
- [x2-Fusion: Cross-Modality and Cross-Dimension Flow Estimation in Event Edge Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16671/) (2026)
- [STeP-Diff: Spatio-Temporal Physics-Informed Diffusion Models for Mobile Fine-Grained Pollution Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04385/) (2025)
- [NERVE: A Neuromorphic Vision and Radar Ensemble for Multi-Sensor Fusion Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16414/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For precise, efficient, and safe drone landings, ground platforms should real-time, accurately locate descending drones and guide them to designated spots. While mmWave sensing combined with cameras improves localization accuracy, the lower sampling frequency of traditional frame cameras compared to mmWave radar creates bottlenecks in system throughput. In this work, we replace the traditional frame camera with event camera, a novel sensor that harmonizes in sampling frequency with mmWave radar within the ground platform setup, and introduce mmE-Loc, a high-precision, low-latency ground localization system designed for drone landings. To fully leverage the textittemporal consistency and textitspatial complementarity between these modalities, we propose two innovative modules, textitconsistency-instructed collaborative tracking and textitgraph-informed adaptive joint optimization, for accurate drone measurement extraction and efficient sensor fusion. Extensive real-world experiments in landing scenarios from a leading drone delivery company demonstrate that mmE-Loc outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both localization accuracy and latency.