This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing
combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal
trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first
autonomous drone racing world championship: the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.
Contrary to traditional drone racing systems, which only detect the next gate,
our approach makes use of any visible gate and takes advantage of multiple,
simultaneous gate detections to compensate for drift in the state estimate and
build a global map of the gates. The global map and drift-compensated state
estimate allow the drone to navigate through the race course even when the
gates are not immediately visible and further enable to plan a near
time-optimal path through the race course in real time based on approximate
drone dynamics. The proposed system has been demonstrated to successfully guide
the drone through tight race courses reaching speeds up to 8m/s and ranked
second at the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.

本文提出了一个新颖的自主、基于视觉的无人机竞速系统，结合学习的数据抽象、非线性滤波和最优时间轨迹规划，该系统已成功在 2019 年 AlphaPilot 挑战赛中部署。与传统的无人机竞赛系统不同，该方法利用任何可见的门并利用多个同时检测到的门来补偿状态估计中的漂移和构建门的全局地图。全局的地图和补偿漂移的状态估计使得无人机在比赛中可以在门不直接可见时导航，并且可以基于近似的无人机动力学实时规划近似最佳路径通过比赛赛道。所提出的系统已经成功地指导无人机穿越狭窄的比赛赛道，达到了每秒 8 米的速度，并在 2019 年 AlphaPilot 挑战赛中排名第二。