Péter Bauer

57220722317

Publications - 8

Stability focused evaluation and tuning of special ground vehicle tracking algorithms

Publication Name: IFAC Papersonline

Publication Date: 2023-07-01

Volume: 56

Issue: 2

Page Range: 9282-9287

Description:

This paper deals with a special tracking problem when a ground vehicle should be tracked by a multicopter flying ahead of the vehicle. Pre-designed vehicle route is assumed and the UAV stops or slows down at every intersection to react to route changes. After introducing the problem, the methods applied in a real flight demonstration in the Smart City module of ZalaZONE proving ground are presented. Then new methods are introduced to possibly improve performance. The main focus of the article is the evaluation of the stability of the methods and the provision of tuning guidelines. All of the introduced methods is tuned based-on the guidelines considering real ground vehicle test data and the high fidelity simulation of the applied multicopter. The two best methods are compared in detail and guidelines of their applicability are provided.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1016/j.ifacol.2023.10.212

Encounter Risk Evaluation with a Forerunner UAV

Publication Name: Remote Sensing

Publication Date: 2023-03-01

Volume: 15

Issue: 6

Page Range: Unknown

Description:

Forerunner UAV refers to an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a downward-looking camera flying in front of the advancing emergency ground vehicles (EGV) to notify the driver about the hidden dangers (e.g., other vehicles). A feasibility demonstration in an urban environment having a multicopter as the forerunner UAV and two cars as the emergency and dangerous ground vehicles was done in ZalaZONE Proving Ground, Hungary. After the description of system hardware and software components, test scenarios, object detection and tracking, the main contribution of the paper is the development and evaluation of encounter risk decision methods. First, the basic collision risk evaluation applied in the demonstration is summarized, then the detailed development of an improved method is presented. It starts with the comparison of different velocity and acceleration estimation methods. Then, vehicle motion prediction is conducted, considering estimated data and its uncertainty. The prediction time horizon is determined based on actual EGV speed and so braking time. If the predicted trajectories intersect, then the EGV driver is notified about the danger. Some special relations between EGV and the other vehicle are also handled. Tuning and comparison of basic and improved methods is done based on real data from the demonstration. The improved method can notify the driver longer, identify special relations between the vehicles and it is adaptive considering actual EGV speed and EGV braking characteristics; therefore, it is selected for future application.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.3390/rs15061512

Software-in-the-loop simulation of the forerunner UAV system

Publication Name: IFAC Papersonline

Publication Date: 2022-07-01

Volume: 55

Issue: 14

Page Range: 139-144

Description:

The forerunner UAV means a camera equipped drone flying in front of the advancing first responder units to increase driver situational awareness with an aerial view of the traffic situation and notification about imminent dangers. This article presents the software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation of the concept including UNREAL4-Carla as the virtual reality environment with a firetruck driven through a game controller, the Matlab simulation of the DJI M600 forerunner hexacopter with UDP communication between firetruck and M600 and the real-time AI processing of synthetic images to detect ground vehicles and pedestrians. The target of SIL development is threefold. First, to test M600 autopilot and Al-based object detection in close to realistic conditions before the real flights. Second, to make an exhaustive feasibility study of the whole forerunner concept with several simulated situations. Third, to generate the required large amount of image data for AI object detection tuning. After introducing all parts of the SIL simulation the article presents an illustrative example evaluating the tracking of the ground vehicle with the M600 and the inference system results.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1016/j.ifacol.2022.07.596

The Forerunner UAV Concept for the Increased Safety of First Responders

Publication Name: International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems Vehits Proceedings

Publication Date: 2021-01-01

Volume: 2021-April

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 362-369

Description:

This paper proposes a novel Forerunner UAV concept to increase the safety of first responders by monitoring the road in front of their emergency ground vehicle (EGV) and notifying the driver about any violation of his/her right of way or approaching danger. The developments are conducted in an R&D project in Hungary. The proposed UAV for the planned urban demonstration is a hexacopter with triple redundant architecture applying a gimbaled camera to monitor the surroundings. In the cooperative control of the EGV and UAV the UAV must fly in front of the EGV which is possible through wireless communication of route data and velocity. Besides the real system a computer simulation representation is also applied including CARLA and Matlab to make exhaustive tests of the system capabilities. Increased attention is devoted to the possible wireless communication solutions as these are safety critical parts of the system. The article ends with the lists of planned simulation and real test scenarios to evaluate the system.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: DOI not available

The applicability of on-line contextual calibration to a neural network based monocular collision avoidance system on a UAV

Publication Name: IFAC Papersonline

Publication Date: 2019-01-01

Volume: 52

Issue: 11

Page Range: 7-12

Description:

Contextual calibration for object detection is a technique where a pretrained network collects attractive false positives during a calibration phase and use this calibration data for further training. This paper investigates the applicability of this method to a vision based onboard sense and avoid system, which requires intruder aircraft detection in camera images. Various landscape and sky backgrounds were generated by Unreal4 3D engine for calibration tests. Contextual calibration is a promising candidate for handling extreme situations which are not covered well in the training data.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1016/j.ifacol.2019.09.110

Comparison of Optical Flow-Based Linear Angular Rate Estimation Methods Considering Real Flight Data

Publication Name: IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation Icca

Publication Date: 2025-01-01

Volume: Unknown

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: 829-834

Description:

The angular velocities of an observer moving through an arbitrary scene can be obtained solely from mono camera image sequences, utilizing the optical flow. A major obstacle in this approach is that, the optical flow is non linearly related to the 3-D motion parameters. In this work three possible linear methods are presented to solve this nonlinear equation and then these methods are evaluated and compared using real mono camera images and real sensor measurements collected during two test flights.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1109/ICCA65672.2025.11129718

Sensor Bias Ambiguity in GNSS-IMU Pose Estimation and Its Solution

Publication Name: ASME Letters in Dynamic Systems and Control

Publication Date: 2025-10-01

Volume: 5

Issue: 4

Page Range: Unknown

Description:

This article deals with the topic of pose and sensor bias estimation based on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) measurements, which is a widely discussed topic but usually by omitting the rigorous check of state observability leading to the suspicion of invalid assumptions. The current work underlines this suspicion by pointing out through observability calculations that to estimate position, velocity, attitude and acceleration, and angular rate biases of a system, attitude related measurements should be included besides GNSS position and velocity data. Such measurement can be the magnetic vector. Theoretical results are underlined by tests considering real-flight GNSS and IMU data of a DJI M600 Pro multicopter and comparing the results to the onboard DJI pose estimator.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1115/1.4069343

Design constraints of a forerunner UAV in safety improvement of first responders

Publication Name: Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Publication Date: 2025-11-01

Volume: 34

Issue: Unknown

Page Range: Unknown

Description:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are already in use by emergency services. Drones are becoming faster and more reliable, making them suitable for safety-critical tasks. A forerunner UAV can fly ahead of an emergency ground vehicle (EGV). It can make a decision on the traffic situation at the next intersection to notify the EGV driver if other vehicles have given the right of way or not. This notification service can increase the speed of the EGV and prevent crashes that may occur due to the driver's obstructed view. A forerunner drone for slow-speed EGV (10 m/s) has already been developed and successfully tested; however, the applicability of current drone technology to the forerunner task at higher speeds was not analyzed. This paper identifies the key parameters of the task itself and the forerunner system in a general case, and gives the main tradeoff inequalities of these design parameters. The requirements and limitations of a forerunner drone are investigated within a reasonable parameter space, and the most relevant configurations are tested in dynamic simulation using optimized velocity profiles for the drone. Software-in-the-loop tests were also performed in a complete city simulation. The results indicate that the forerunner task is solvable with current fastest or near-future drone technology if the route of the EGV is known to the UAV control.

Open Access: Yes

DOI: 10.1016/j.trip.2025.101662