{"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/pencilnet-zero-shot-sim-to-real-transfer","title":"PencilNet: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer Learning for Robust Gate Perception in Autonomous Drone Racing","arxiv_id":"2207.14131","date":"2022-07-28","proceeding":null,"authors":["Huy Xuan Pham","Andriy Sarabakha","Mykola Odnoshyvkin","Erdal Kayacan"],"abstract":"In autonomous and mobile robotics, one of the main challenges is the robust on-the-fly perception of the environment, which is often unknown and dynamic, like in autonomous drone racing. In this work, we propose a novel deep neural network-based perception method for racing gate detection -- PencilNet -- which relies on a lightweight neural network backbone on top of a pencil filter. This approach unifies predictions of the gates' 2D position, distance, and orientation in a single pose tuple. We show that our method is effective for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer learning that does not need any real-world training samples. Moreover, our framework is highly robust to illumination changes commonly seen under rapid flight compared to state-of-art methods. A thorough set of experiments demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach in multiple challenging scenarios, where the drone completes various tracks under different lighting conditions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.14131v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.14131v1.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":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"pencilnet-zero-shot-sim-to-real-transfer","repo_url":"https://github.com/open-airlab/pencilnet","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}