AIcrowd

One of the important challenges of autonomous flight is the Sense and Avoid (SAA) task to maintain enough separation from obstacles. While the route of an autonomous drone might be carefully planned ahead of its mission, and the airspace is relatively sparse, there is still a chance that the drone will encounter unforeseen airborne objects or static obstacles during its autonomous flight. The autonomous SAA module has to take on the tasks of situational awareness, decision making, and flying the aircraft, while performing an evasive maneuver. There are several alternatives for onboard sensing including radar, LIDAR, passive electro-optical sensors, and passive acoustic sensors. Solving the SAA task with visual cameras is attractive because cameras have relatively low weight and low cost. For the purpose of this challenge, we consider a solution that solely relies on a single visual camera and Computer Vision technique that analyzes a monocular video. Flying airborne objects pose unique challenges compared to static obstacles. In addition to the typical small size, it is not sufficient to merely detect and localize those objects in the scene, because prediction of the future motion is essential to correctly estimate if the encounter requires a collision avoidance maneuver and create a safer route. Such prediction will typically rely on analysis of the motion over a period of time, and therefore requires association of the detected objects across the video frames.