Visually Guided Balloon Popping with an Autonomous MAV at MBZIRC 2020

Summary

This paper presents a fully autonomous micro aerial vehicle (MAV) developed to pop balloons using onboard sensing and computing. The system was evaluated at the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020. The MAV successfully popped all five balloons in under two minutes in each of the three competition runs. Why it matters: This demonstrates the potential of autonomous robotics and computer vision for real-world applications in challenging environments.