{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/batmobility-towards-flying-without-seeing-for","title":"BatMobility: Towards Flying Without Seeing for Autonomous Drones","arxiv_id":"2307.11518","date":"2023-07-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Emerson Sie","Zikun Liu","Deepak Vasisht"],"abstract":"Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) rely on optical sensors such as cameras and lidar for autonomous operation. However, such optical sensors are error-prone in bad lighting, inclement weather conditions including fog and smoke, and around textureless or transparent surfaces. In this paper, we ask: is it possible to fly UAVs without relying on optical sensors, i.e., can UAVs fly without seeing? We present BatMobility, a lightweight mmWave radar-only perception system for UAVs that eliminates the need for optical sensors. BatMobility enables two core functionalities for UAVs -- radio flow estimation (a novel FMCW radar-based alternative for optical flow based on surface-parallel doppler shift) and radar-based collision avoidance. We build BatMobility using commodity sensors and deploy it as a real-time system on a small off-the-shelf quadcopter running an unmodified flight controller. Our evaluation shows that BatMobility achieves comparable or better performance than commercial-grade optical sensors across a wide range of scenarios.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.11518v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.11518v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"batmobility-towards-flying-without-seeing-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/connectedsystemslab/batmobility_ae","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"collision-avoidance","task_name":"Collision Avoidance"},{"task_slug":"optical-flow-estimation","task_name":"Optical Flow Estimation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"batmobility-dataset","name":"BatMobility Dataset","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}