arXiv subjects

Shaoming He

Publications and source records attributed to Shaoming He.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

WNOJ-LIO: A White-Noise-on-Jerk Motion-Prior EKF for High-Dynamic LiDAR-IMU Fusion

LiDAR-inertial odometry (LIO) is a key component of autonomous navigation, but high-dynamic driving exposes two coupled challenges: intra-scan motion distortion and vibration-contaminated inertial measurements. Most real-time LiDAR-inertial pipelines propagate the system state by integrating raw IMU measurements and then use the propagated trajectory for point cloud de-distortion, thereby propagating inertial noise into both the corrected scan and the subsequent scan-to-map registration. This paper presents WNOJ-LIO, a LiDAR-IMU fusion framework based on a White-Noise-on-Jerk (WNOJ) Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). WNOJ-LIO employs a decoupled WNOJ prior on $\R^3 \times \SO(3)$ for state prediction and treats the IMU as a high-frequency measurement source rather than the driver of state propagation. The resulting posterior state history is then used for LiDAR scan de-distortion and subsequent point-to-plane LiDAR updates. The decoupled process model enables closed-form covariance propagation, thereby bridging the gap between batch WNOJ Gaussian process (GP) trajectory priors and recursive filtering. Simulation results demonstrate improvements in acceleration and angular-velocity denoising, scan de-distortion, and localization accuracy over a FAST-LIO-style baseline. Real-world experiments were conducted using an autonomous racing car on four driving segments with maximum speeds ranging from 53 to 208~km/h, covering a wide range of vehicle vibration levels. The experiments further validate the proposed method and provide a comprehensive evaluation of its performance in estimating acceleration, angular velocity, body-frame linear velocity, attitude, and position under highly dynamic driving. The source code of WNOJ-LIO is publicly available at https://github.com/LvJohny/wnoj-ekf-lio.git.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

MF-UAVPose6D: A Model-Free Monocular 6-DoF Pose Estimation Framework for Fixed-Wing UAVs

For uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), estimating six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) poses is essential for airspace situational awareness, target tracking, and counter-UAV operations. However, non-cooperative targets usually lack computer-aided design (CAD) models and keypoint priors, making existing model-based or keypoint-matching methods difficult to apply reliably. To address these challenges, this paper proposes MF-UAVPose6D, a model-free monocular 6-DoF pose estimation framework for fixed-wing UAVs. During inference, the method takes only a single red-green-blue (RGB) image and camera intrinsics as input. It first obtains a stable target anchor through heatmap-guided center localization, introduces a Perspective-Aware Module (PAM) to model observation-ray priors, exploits Dynamic Topological Sampling (DTS) to complement weak structural cues from the wings, fuselage, and tail, and adopts a decoupled translation-rotation pose decoding mechanism to estimate the 6-DoF pose. In addition, we construct the FW-UAV6DPose synthetic dataset, which covers fixed-wing UAV observations across diverse distances, viewpoints, and poses. Experimental results show that MF-UAVPose6D achieves accurate and efficient monocular 6-DoF pose estimation without requiring CAD models, and demonstrates strong robustness in long-range rotation estimation, depth recovery, and joint pose evaluation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

AUSLUN: A Fixed-Hover UAV--USV System for GNSS-Denied Maritime Search and Navigation

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) denial can prevent an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) from both finding a distant vessel and maintaining a globally referenced approach. This paper presents AUSLUN (Automatic UAV Search, Localization, and USV Navigation), a fixed-hover aerial-surface system that uses a coastal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which estimates its own pose through visual-inertial odometry (VIO), as a long-range sensing and navigation anchor. The central design shifts sensing motion from UAV translation to a zoom pod and closes the loop through three coupled elements: polygon-aware annular pod scanning, modality-aware bearing-range localization, and target-relative USV guidance with visual-loss recovery. The same gated recursive estimator uses laser range for the non-cooperative target and datalink range for the cooperative USV. Search-planning simulations show that the adaptive yaw bounds reduce scan time and redundant coverage relative to a matched fixed-sector scan, and GPS-referenced field data show that the gated recursive estimator outperforms non-recursive baselines in localization accuracy. An integrated maritime mission further demonstrates the complete search-to-navigation sequence, including a deliberately triggered visual-loss recovery. These results establish the feasibility and operating boundary of fixed-hover UAV assistance for stationary-target approach in coastal GNSS-denied environments. The source code and a video demonstration are publicly available at https://github.com/xirhxq/pod_search and https://youtu.be/S-5RkJs35JI.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

SCT-MOT: Enhancing Air-to-Air Multiple UAVs Tracking with Swarm-Coupled Motion and Trajectory Guidance

Air-to-air tracking of swarm UAVs presents significant challenges due to the complex nonlinear group motion and weak visual cues for small objects, which often cause detection failures, trajectory fragmentation, and identity switches. Although existing methods have attempted to improve performance by incorporating trajectory prediction, they model each object independently, neglecting the swarm-level motion dependencies. Their limited integration between motion prediction and appearance representation also weakens the spatio-temporal consistency required for tracking in visually ambiguous and cluttered environments, making it difficult to maintain coherent trajectories and reliable associations. To address these challenges, we propose SCT-MOT, a tracking framework that integrates Swarm-Coupled motion modeling and Trajectory-guided feature fusion. First, we develop a Swarm Motion-Aware Trajectory Prediction (SMTP) module jointly models historical trajectories and posture-aware appearance features from a swarm-level perspective, enabling more accurate forecasting of the nonlinear, coupled group trajectories. Second, we design a Trajectory-Guided Spatio-Temporal Feature Fusion (TG-STFF) module aligns predicted positions with historical visual cues and deeply integrates them with current frame features, enhancing temporal consistency and spatial discriminability for weak objects. Extensive experiments on three public air-to-air swarm UAV tracking datasets, including AIRMOT, MOT-FLY, and UAVSwarm, demonstrate that SMTP achieves more accurate trajectory forecasts and yields a 1.21\% IDF1 improvement over the state-of-the-art trajectory prediction module EqMotion when integrated into the same MOT framework. Overall, our SCT-MOT consistently achieves superior accuracy and robustness compared to state-of-the-art trackers across multiple metrics under complex swarm scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Acceleration-Based Control of Fixed-Wing UAVs for Guidance Applications

Acceleration-commanded guidance laws (e.g., proportional navigation) are attractive for high-level decision making, but their direct deployment on fixed-wing UAVs is challenging because accelerations are not directly actuated and must be realized through attitude and thrust under flight-envelope constraints. This paper presents an acceleration-level outer-loop control framework that converts commanded tangential and normal accelerations into executable body-rate and normalized thrust commands compatible with mainstream autopilots (e.g., PX4/APM). For the normal channel, we derive an engineering mapping from the desired normal acceleration to roll- and pitch-rate commands that regulate the direction and magnitude of the lift vector under small-angle assumptions. For the tangential channel, we introduce an energy-based formulation inspired by total energy control and identify an empirical thrust-energy acceleration relationship directly from flight data, avoiding explicit propulsion modeling or thrust bench calibration. We further discuss priority handling between normal and tangential accelerations under saturation and non-level maneuvers. Extensive real-flight experiments on a VTOL fixed-wing platform demonstrate accurate acceleration tracking and enable practical implementation of proportional navigation using only body-rate and normalized thrust interfaces.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Communication-Aware Asynchronous Distributed Trajectory Optimization for UAV Swarm

Distributed optimization offers a promising paradigm for trajectory planning in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms, yet its deployment in communication-constrained environments remains challenging due to unreliable links and limited data exchange. This paper addresses this issue via a two-tier architecture explicitly designed for operation under communication constraints. We develop a Communication-Aware Asynchronous Distributed Trajectory Optimization (CA-ADTO) framework that integrates Parameterized Differential Dynamic Programming (PDDP) for local trajectory optimization of individual UAVs with an asynchronous Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (async-ADMM) for swarm-level coordination. The proposed architecture enables fully distributed optimization while substantially reducing communication overhead, making it suitable for real-world scenarios in which reliable connectivity cannot be guaranteed. The method is particularly effective in handling nonlinear dynamics and spatio-temporal coupling under communication constraints.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Distributed Spatial-Temporal Trajectory Optimization for Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicle Swarm

Swarm trajectory optimization problems are a well-recognized class of multi-agent optimal control problems with strong nonlinearity. However, the heuristic nature of needing to set the final time for agents beforehand and the time-consuming limitation of the significant number of iterations prohibit the application of existing methods to large-scale swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in practice. In this paper, we propose a spatial-temporal trajectory optimization framework that accomplishes multi-UAV consensus based on the Alternating Direction Multiplier Method (ADMM) and uses Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) for fast local planning of individual UAVs. The introduced framework is a two-level architecture that employs Parameterized DDP (PDDP) as the trajectory optimizer for each UAV, and ADMM to satisfy the local constraints and accomplish the spatial-temporal parameter consensus among all UAVs. This results in a fully distributed algorithm called Distributed Parameterized DDP (D-PDDP). In addition, an adaptive tuning criterion based on the spectral gradient method for the penalty parameter is proposed to reduce the number of algorithmic iterations. Several simulation examples are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

AMO-HEAD: Adaptive MARG-Only Heading Estimation for UAVs under Magnetic Disturbances

Accurate and robust heading estimation is crucial for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) when conducting indoor inspection tasks. However, the cluttered nature of indoor environments often introduces severe magnetic disturbances, which can significantly degrade heading accuracy. To address this challenge, this paper presents an Adaptive MARG-Only Heading (AMO-HEAD) estimation approach for UAVs operating in magnetically disturbed environments. AMO-HEAD is a lightweight and computationally efficient Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) framework that leverages inertial and magnetic sensors to achieve reliable heading estimation. In the proposed approach, gyroscope angular rate measurements are integrated to propagate the quaternion state, which is subsequently corrected using accelerometer and magnetometer data. The corrected quaternion is then used to compute the UAV's heading. An adaptive process noise covariance method is introduced to model and compensate for gyroscope measurement noise, bias drift, and discretization errors arising from the Euler method integration. To mitigate the effects of external magnetic disturbances, a scaling factor is applied based on real-time magnetic deviation detection. A theoretical observability analysis of the proposed AMO-HEAD is performed using the Lie derivative. Extensive experiments were conducted in real world indoor environments with customized UAV platforms. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in providing precise heading estimation under magnetically disturbed conditions.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

GL-DT: Multi-UAV Detection and Tracking with Global-Local Integration

The extensive application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in military reconnaissance, environmental monitoring, and related domains has created an urgent need for accurate and efficient multi-object tracking (MOT) technologies, which are also essential for UAV situational awareness. However, complex backgrounds, small-scale targets, and frequent occlusions and interactions continue to challenge existing methods in terms of detection accuracy and trajectory continuity. To address these issues, this paper proposes the Global-Local Detection and Tracking (GL-DT) framework. It employs a Spatio-Temporal Feature Fusion (STFF) module to jointly model motion and appearance features, combined with a global-local collaborative detection strategy, effectively enhancing small-target detection. Building upon this, the JPTrack tracking algorithm is introduced to mitigate common issues such as ID switches and trajectory fragmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves the continuity and stability of MOT while maintaining real-time performance, providing strong support for the advancement of UAV detection and tracking technologies.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

STA-GANN: A Valid and Generalizable Spatio-Temporal Kriging Approach

Spatio-temporal tasks often encounter incomplete data arising from missing or inaccessible sensors, making spatio-temporal kriging crucial for inferring the completely missing temporal information. However, current models struggle with ensuring the validity and generalizability of inferred spatio-temporal patterns, especially in capturing dynamic spatial dependencies and temporal shifts, and optimizing the generalizability of unknown sensors. To overcome these limitations, we propose Spatio-Temporal Aware Graph Adversarial Neural Network (STA-GANN), a novel GNN-based kriging framework that improves spatio-temporal pattern validity and generalization. STA-GANN integrates (i) Decoupled Phase Module that senses and adjusts for timestamp shifts. (ii) Dynamic Data-Driven Metadata Graph Modeling to update spatial relationships using temporal data and metadata; (iii) An adversarial transfer learning strategy to ensure generalizability. Extensive validation across nine datasets from four fields and theoretical evidence both demonstrate the superior performance of STA-GANN.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Drone Carrier: An Integrated Unmanned Surface Vehicle for Autonomous Inspection and Intervention in GNSS-Denied Maritime Environment

This paper introduces an innovative drone carrier concept that is applied in maritime port security or offshore rescue. This system works with a heterogeneous system consisting of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) to perform inspection and intervention tasks in GNSS-denied or interrupted environments. The carrier, an electric catamaran measuring 4m by 7m, features a 4m by 6m deck supporting automated takeoff and landing for four DJI M300 drones, along with a 10kg-payload manipulator operable in up to level 3 sea conditions. Utilizing an offshore gimbal camera for navigation, the carrier can autonomously navigate, approach and dock with non-cooperative vessels, guided by an onboard camera, LiDAR, and Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) over a 3 km$^2$ area. UAVs equipped with onboard Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology execute mapping, detection, and manipulation tasks using a versatile gripper designed for wet, saline conditions. Additionally, two UAVs can coordinate to transport large objects to the manipulator or interact directly with them. These procedures are fully automated and were successfully demonstrated at the Mohammed Bin Zayed International Robotic Competition (MBZIRC2024), where the drone carrier equipped with four UAVS and one manipulator, automatically accomplished the intervention tasks in sea-level-3 (wave height 1.25m) based on the rough target information.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

An Aerial Transport System in Marine GNSS-Denied Environment

This paper presents an autonomous aerial system specifically engineered for operation in challenging marine GNSS-denied environments, aimed at transporting small cargo from a target vessel. In these environments, characterized by weakly textured sea surfaces with few feature points, chaotic deck oscillations due to waves, and significant wind gusts, conventional navigation methods often prove inadequate. Leveraging the DJI M300 platform, our system is designed to autonomously navigate and transport cargo while overcoming these environmental challenges. In particular, this paper proposes an anchor-based localization method using ultrawideband (UWB) and QR codes facilities, which decouples the UAV's attitude from that of the moving landing platform, thus reducing control oscillations caused by platform movement. Additionally, a motor-driven attachment mechanism for cargo is designed, which enhances the UAV's field of view during descent and ensures a reliable attachment to the cargo upon landing. The system's reliability and effectiveness were progressively enhanced through multiple outdoor experimental iterations and were validated by the successful cargo transport during the 2024 Mohamed BinZayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC2024) competition. Crucially, the system addresses uncertainties and interferences inherent in maritime transportation missions without prior knowledge of cargo locations on the deck and with strict limitations on intervention throughout the transportation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Real-Time Detection for Small UAVs: Combining YOLO and Multi-frame Motion Analysis

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) detection technology plays a critical role in mitigating security risks and safeguarding privacy in both military and civilian applications. However, traditional detection methods face significant challenges in identifying UAV targets with extremely small pixels at long distances. To address this issue, we propose the Global-Local YOLO-Motion (GL-YOMO) detection algorithm, which combines You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection with multi-frame motion detection techniques, markedly enhancing the accuracy and stability of small UAV target detection. The YOLO detection algorithm is optimized through multi-scale feature fusion and attention mechanisms, while the integration of the Ghost module further improves efficiency. Additionally, a motion detection approach based on template matching is being developed to augment detection capabilities for minute UAV targets. The system utilizes a global-local collaborative detection strategy to achieve high precision and efficiency. Experimental results on a self-constructed fixed-wing UAV dataset demonstrate that the GL-YOMO algorithm significantly enhances detection accuracy and stability, underscoring its potential in UAV detection applications.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Long-Range Vision-Based UAV-assisted Localization for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

The global positioning system (GPS) has become an indispensable navigation method for field operations with unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in marine environments. However, GPS may not always be available outdoors because it is vulnerable to natural interference and malicious jamming attacks. Thus, an alternative navigation system is required when the use of GPS is restricted or prohibited. To this end, we present a novel method that utilizes an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to assist in localizing USVs in GNSS-restricted marine environments. In our approach, the UAV flies along the shoreline at a consistent altitude, continuously tracking and detecting the USV using a deep learning-based approach on camera images. Subsequently, triangulation techniques are applied to estimate the USV's position relative to the UAV, utilizing geometric information and datalink range from the UAV. We propose adjusting the UAV's camera angle based on the pixel error between the USV and the image center throughout the localization process to enhance accuracy. Additionally, visual measurements are integrated into an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) for robust state estimation. To validate our proposed method, we utilize a USV equipped with onboard sensors and a UAV equipped with a camera. A heterogeneous robotic interface is established to facilitate communication between the USV and UAV. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through a series of experiments conducted during the ``Muhammad Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge (MBZIRC-2024)'' in real marine environments, incorporating noisy measurements and ocean disturbances. The successful outcomes indicate the potential of our method to complement GPS for USV navigation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2023

MuLA-GAN: Multi-Level Attention GAN for Enhanced Underwater Visibility

The underwater environment presents unique challenges, including color distortions, reduced contrast, and blurriness, hindering accurate analysis. In this work, we introduce MuLA-GAN, a novel approach that leverages the synergistic power of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Multi-Level Attention mechanisms for comprehensive underwater image enhancement. The integration of Multi-Level Attention within the GAN architecture significantly enhances the model's capacity to learn discriminative features crucial for precise image restoration. By selectively focusing on relevant spatial and multi-level features, our model excels in capturing and preserving intricate details in underwater imagery, essential for various applications. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses on diverse datasets, including UIEB test dataset, UIEB challenge dataset, U45, and UCCS dataset, highlight the superior performance of MuLA-GAN compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. Experimental evaluations on a specialized dataset tailored for bio-fouling and aquaculture applications demonstrate the model's robustness in challenging environmental conditions. On the UIEB test dataset, MuLA-GAN achieves exceptional PSNR (25.59) and SSIM (0.893) scores, surpassing Water-Net, the second-best model, with scores of 24.36 and 0.885, respectively. This work not only addresses a significant research gap in underwater image enhancement but also underscores the pivotal role of Multi-Level Attention in enhancing GANs, providing a novel and comprehensive framework for restoring underwater image quality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Vision-Based Autonomous Navigation for Unmanned Surface Vessel in Extreme Marine Conditions

Visual perception is an important component for autonomous navigation of unmanned surface vessels (USV), particularly for the tasks related to autonomous inspection and tracking. These tasks involve vision-based navigation techniques to identify the target for navigation. Reduced visibility under extreme weather conditions in marine environments makes it difficult for vision-based approaches to work properly. To overcome these issues, this paper presents an autonomous vision-based navigation framework for tracking target objects in extreme marine conditions. The proposed framework consists of an integrated perception pipeline that uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) to remove noise and highlight the object features before passing them to the object detector (i.e., YOLOv5). The detected visual features are then used by the USV to track the target. The proposed framework has been thoroughly tested in simulation under extremely reduced visibility due to sandstorms and fog. The results are compared with state-of-the-art de-hazing methods across the benchmarked MBZIRC simulation dataset, on which the proposed scheme has outperformed the existing methods across various metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Domain-Knowledge-Aided Airborne Ground Moving Targets Tracking

This paper investigates the problem of traffic surveillance using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and proposes a domain-knowledge-aided airborne ground moving targets tracking algorithm. To improve the accuracy of multiple targets tracking, the proposed algorithm incorporates domain knowledge into the joint probabilistic data association (JPDA) filter as state constraints. The domain knowledge considered in this paper includes both road information extracted from a given map and local traffic regulations. Conventional track update method is modified to enhance the capability of recognition of temporarily track loss. A variable structure multiple model (VS-MM) method is developed to assign the road segment to a given target. The effectiveness of proposed algorithm is demonstrated through extensive numerical simulations.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

Information-Weighted Consensus Filter with Partial Information Exchange

In this paper, the information-weighted consensus filter (ICF) with partial information exchange is proposed to reduce the bandwidth of the signals transmitted between the sensor nodes and guarantee its convergence to the centralized Kalman filter (CKF). In the proposed algorithm, a part of information chosen with the entry selection matrix is transmitted to the sensor nodes in the neighborhood at each consensus step, and consensus averaging is conducted at each sensor node with the partial and the local information. This ensures that the proposed distributed estimation algorithm converges to the centralized algorithm, while allowing the proposed algorithm to achieve bandwidth reduction of the signals transmitted between the sensors. With the proposed algorithm, the stability of the estimation error dynamics is proven and the convergence to the centralized algorithm is mathematically shown using the property of the average consensus. Simulations are conducted to validate the proposed ICF with partial information exchange and the related theoretical findings.

cs.IT↗