27/05/2026
Autonomous GNSS-denied flight over long distances 25m AGL in the real world? Yes, it is possible!🚁
We won the SPRIN-D Fully Autonomous Flight Challenge, and our paper was accepted to ICRA 2026! 🥳 You can meet us in Vienna at the poster session on Tuesday, 15:00–16:30, TuI2I.209, or during the Field Robotics Workshop on Friday, 15:00-16:00
How does the proposed system work?🤔 Building on our custom MRS UAV System for real-world autonomy, we proposed a lightweight global localization module that matches a local LiDAR-based volumetric map to a map prior—a heightmap derived from remote sensing data. This approach successfully mitigates Visual-Inertial Odometry drift and enabled fully onboard kilometer-scale GNSS-denied flights in the demanding, realistic conditions prepared by the challenge organizers from SPRIND.
In the paper, we report practical lessons learned from our field deployment, which we hope will help guide the design of future resilient UAV autonomy in GNSS-denied settings.
🔗 Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01348
🎬 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgRaCkPJ5CQ
💻 Webpage: https://gnssdenied.github.io/
