Abstract: We present an approach to autonomous drone racing inspired by how a human pilot learns a race track. Human pilots drive around the track multiple times to familiarise themselves with the track and find key points that allow them to complete the track without the risk of collision. This paper proposes a three-stage approach: exploration, navigation, and refinement. Our approach does not require prior knowledge about the race track, such as the number of gates, their positions, and their orientations. Instead, we use a trained neural pilot called DeepPilot to return basic flight commands from camera images where a gate is visible to navigate an unknown race track and a Single Shot Detector to visually detect the gates during the exploration stage to identify points of interest. These points are then used in the navigation stage as waypoints in a flight controller to enable faster flight and navigate the entire race track. Finally, in the refinement stage, we use the methodology developed in stages 1 and 2, to generate novel data to re-train DeepPilot, which produces more realistic manoeuvres for when the drone has to cross a gate. In this sense, similar to the original work, rather than generating examples by flying in a full track, we use small tracks of three gates to discover effective waypoints to be followed by the waypoint controller. This produces novel training data for DeepPilot without human intervention. By training with this new data, DeepPilot significantly improves its performance by increasing its flight speed twice w.r.t. its original version. Also, for this stage 3, we required 66% less training data than in the original DeepPilot without compromising the effectiveness of DeepPilot to enable a drone to autonomously fly in a racetrack.
Keywords: Autonomous drone racing, deep learning, neural pilot
