Autonomous Drone Flight Over 1 Kilometer Forest Trail

This video demonstrates our autonomous navigation system for drones and mobile robotics. The system uses Deep Neural Network for visual perception and path finding. This video features a world record 1 kilometer autonomous drone flight over a forest trail (visual navigation only, no GPS, no maps). It was presented at GTC 2017 conference (session #S7172). This video accompanies our paper: “Toward Low-Flying Autonomous MAV Trail Navigation using Deep Neural Networks for Environmental Awareness“. Arxiv pre-print: arXiv: [] : Abstract - We present a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) system, built with inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware, for autonomously following trails in unstructured, outdoor environments such as forests. The system introduces a deep neural network (DNN) called TrailNet for estimating the view orientation and lateral offset of the MAV with respect to the trail center. The DNN utilizes a novel application of transfer le