FAST Lab’s recent work “EGO-Swarm” made frontpage news of Science Magazine

On December 16, 2020, the FAST Lab’s recent work “EGO-Swarm” made the frontpage news of Science (www.ScienceMag.org).

Led by Prof. XU Chao and Dr. GAO Fei, the FAST (Field Autonomous System & compuTing) Lab is part of the Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University. It is mainly engaged in the fields of Autonomous Systems (navigation, control, motion planning, perception, SLAM, etc.), AI (imaging, vision, machine learning, control, etc.) for Turbulent Flows, Data-driven Science and Engineering, and Synergy of AI and Control.

The recent work of the lab, EGO-Swarm, is a decentralized and asynchronous systematic solution for multi-robot autonomous navigation in unknown obstacle-rich scenes using merely onboard resources. The planning system is formulated under gradient-based local planning framework, where collision avoidance is achieved by formulating the collision risk as a penalty of a nonlinear optimization problem. In order to improve robustness and escape local minima, the team incorporates a lightweight topological trajectory generation method. Then agents generate safe, smooth, and dynamically feasible trajectories in only several milliseconds using an unreliable trajectory sharing network. Relative localization drift among agents is corrected by using agent detection in depth images. The method is demonstrated in both simulation and real-world experiments.

The first author of the paper is ZHOU Xin, a first-year graduate student, and the corresponding author is Dr. GAO Fei.

To read the Science news: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/watch-swarm-drones-fly-through-heavy-forest-while-staying-formation

To watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IujQzSQtaTU&ab_channel=ScienceMagazine

To read the preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04183

Reporter: WANG Zhicheng

Editor: WANG Jing