Michael Watterson — accepted AI-conference papers

2019

The Open Vision Computer: An Integrated Sensing and Compute System for Mobile Robots

Morgan Quigley, Kartik Mohta, Shreyas S. Shivakumar, Michael Watterson, Yash Mulgaonkar, Mikael Arguedas +5

ICRA 2019poster

In this paper we describe the Open Vision Computer (OVC) which was designed to support high speed, vision guided autonomous drone flight. In particular our aim was to develop a system that would be suitable for relatively small-scale flying platforms where size, weight, power consumption and computa…

Cited by 40 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2018

Experiments in Fast, Autonomous, GPS-Denied Quadrotor Flight

Kartik Mohta, Ke Sun, Sikang Liu, Michael Watterson, Bernd Pfrommer, James Svacha +3

ICRA 2018poster

High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small as possible. Aerial robots add a limitation of payload capaci…

Cited by 61 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2018

Inertial Velocity and Attitude Estimation for Quadrotors

James Svacha, Kartik Mohta, Michael Watterson, Giuseppe Loianno, Vijay Kumar

IROS 2018poster

This work addresses the design and implementation of a filter that estimates the orientation of the body-fixed z axis and the velocity of a quadrotor UAV from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) given a known yaw. The velocity and attitude estimation is possible since the filter employs a linear dra…

Cited by 20 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2018

Robust Stereo Visual Inertial Odometry for Fast Autonomous Flight

Ke Sun, Kartik Mohta, Bernd Pfrommer, Michael Watterson, Sikang Liu, Yash Mulgaonkar +2

RA-L 2018

In recent years, vision-aided inertial odometry for state estimation has matured significantly. However, we still encounter challenges in terms of improving the computational efficiency and robustness of the underlying algorithms for applications in autonomous flight with microaerial vehicles, in wh

Cited by 502 Source ↗code ↗Scholar ↗

2018

Trajectory Optimization On Manifolds with Applications to SO(3) and R3XS2

Michael Watterson, Sikang Liu, Ke Sun, Trey Smith, Vijay Kumar

RSS 2018poster

Manifolds are used in almost all robotics applications even if they are not explicitly modeled. We propose a differential geometric approach for optimizing trajectories on a Riemannian manifold with obstacles. The optimization problem depends on a metric and collision function specific to a manifol…

Cited by 35 Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗

2017

Planning Dynamically Feasible Trajectories for Quadrotors Using Safe Flight Corridors in 3-D Complex Environments

Sikang Liu, Michael Watterson, Kartik Mohta, Ke Sun, Subhrajit Bhattacharya, Camillo J. Taylor +1

RA-L 2017

There is extensive literature on using convex optimization to derive piece-wise polynomial trajectories for controlling differential flat systems with applications to three-dimensional flight for Micro Aerial Vehicles. In this work, we propose a method to formulate trajectory generation as a quadrat

Cited by 539 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2016

High speed navigation for quadrotors with limited onboard sensing

Sikang Liu, Michael Watterson, Sarah Y. Tang, Vijay Kumar

ICRA 2016

We address the problem of high speed autonomous navigation of quadrotor micro aerial vehicles with limited onboard sensing and computation. In particular, we propose a dual range planning horizon method to safely and quickly navigate quadrotors to specified goal locations in previously unknown and u

Cited by 118 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2016

Smooth trajectory generation on SE(3) for a free flying space robot

Michael Watterson, Trey Smith, Vijay Kumar

IROS 2016poster

We propose a new optimal trajectory generation technique on SE(3) which avoids known obstacles. We leverage techniques from differential geometry and Lie algebra to formulate a cost functional which is intrinsic to the geometric structure of this space and makes physical sense. We propose an approxi…

Cited by 20 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2016

Visual inertial odometry for quadrotors on SE(3)

Giuseppe Loianno, Michael Watterson, Vijay Kumar

ICRA 2016

The combination of on-board sensors measurements with different statistical characteristics can be employed in robotics for localization and control, especially in GPS-denied environments. In particular, most aerial vehicles are packaged with low cost sensors, important for aerial robotics, such as

Cited by 59 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2015

Safe receding horizon control for aggressive MAV flight with limited range sensing

Michael Watterson, Vijay Kumar

IROS 2015poster

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are becoming ubiquitous, but most experiments and demonstrations have been limited to slow flight except in open environments or in laboratories with motion capture systems. In this paper, we develop representations and algorithms for aggressive flight in cluttered envir…

Cited by 63 Source ↗Scholar ↗