The spread of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the last decade revolutionized many applications fields. Most investigated research topics focus on increasing autonomy during operational campaigns, environmental monitoring, surveillance, maps, and labeling. To achieve such complex goals, a high-level module is exploited to build semantic knowledge leveraging the outputs of the low-level module that takes data acquired from multiple sensors and extracts information concerning what is sensed. All in all, the detection of the objects is undoubtedly the most important low-level task, and the most employed sensors to accomplish it are by far RGB cameras due to costs, dimensions, and the wide literature on RGB-based object detection. This survey presents recent advancements in 2D object detection for the case of UAVs, focusing on the differences, strategies, and trade-offs between the generic problem of object detection, and the adaptation of such solutions for operations of the UAV. Moreover, a new taxonomy that considers different heights intervals and driven by the methodological approaches introduced by the works in the state of the art instead of hardware, physical and/or technological constraints is proposed.

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Efficient localisation plays a vital role in many modern applications of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which contributes to improved control, safety, power economy, etc. The ubiquitous 5G NR (New Radio) cellular network will provide new opportunities to enhance the localisation of UAVs and UGVs. In this paper, we review radio frequency (RF)-based approaches to localisation. We review the RF features that can be utilized for localisation and investigate the current methods suitable for Unmanned Vehicles under two general categories: range-based and fingerprinting. The existing state-of-the-art literature on RF-based localisation for both UAVs and UGVs is examined, and the envisioned 5G NR for localisation enhancement, and the future research direction are explored.

Precise and robust localization is of fundamental importance for robots required to carry out autonomous tasks. Above all, in the case of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), efficiency and reliability are critical aspects in developing solutions for localization due to the limited computational capabilities, payload and power constraints. In this work, we leverage novel research in efficient deep neural architectures for the problem of 6 Degrees of Freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation from single RGB camera images. In particular, we introduce an efficient neural network to jointly regress the position and orientation of the camera with respect to the navigation environment. Experimental results show that the proposed network is capable of retaining similar results with respect to the most popular state of the art methods while being smaller and with lower latency, which are fundamental aspects for real-time robotics applications.

The ability of the robots to imitate human movements has been an active research study since the dawn of the robotics. Obtaining a realistic imitation is essential in terms of perceived quality in human-robot interaction, but it is still a challenge due to the lack of effective mapping between human movements and the degrees of freedom of robotics systems. If high-level programming interfaces, software and simulation tools simplified robot programming, there is still a strong gap between robot control and natural user interfaces. In this paper, a system to reproduce on a robot the head movements of a user in the field of view of a consumer camera is presented. The system recognizes the presence of a user and its head pose in real-time by using a deep neural network, in order to extract head position angles and to command the robot head movements consequently, obtaining a realistic imitation. At the same time, the system represents a natural user interface to control the Aldebaran NAO and Pepper humanoid robots with the head movements, with applications in human-robot interaction. CCS Concepts • Human-centered Computing ➝ Human computer interaction (HCI) • Computer systems organization → Embedded and cyber-physical systems → Robotics