Ultra-High-Frequency Harmony: mmWave Radar and Event Camera Orchestrate Accurate Drone Landing
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Feb 20, 2025
Abstract
For precise, efficient, and safe drone landings, ground platforms should
real-time, accurately locate descending drones and guide them to designated
spots. While mmWave sensing combined with cameras improves localization
accuracy, the lower sampling frequency of traditional frame cameras compared to
mmWave radar creates bottlenecks in system throughput. In this work, we replace
the traditional frame camera with event camera, a novel sensor that harmonizes
in sampling frequency with mmWave radar within the ground platform setup, and
introduce mmE-Loc, a high-precision, low-latency ground localization system
designed for drone landings. To fully leverage the \textit{temporal
consistency} and \textit{spatial complementarity} between these modalities, we
propose two innovative modules, \textit{consistency-instructed collaborative
tracking} and \textit{graph-informed adaptive joint optimization}, for accurate
drone measurement extraction and efficient sensor fusion. Extensive real-world
experiments in landing scenarios from a leading drone delivery company
demonstrate that mmE-Loc outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both
localization accuracy and latency.
