A graduate team from the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) recently won the championship of the challenge event on intelligent cooperative navigation and operations of multiple aerial vehicles in narrow indoor passages, at the 12th China Graduate Future Flight Vehicle Innovation Competition held in Wuhan, Hubei province.

The team achieved a full score, finishing 90 seconds ahead of the second-place team.

The team is affiliated with the National Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems at BIT and works under the team of Academician Chen Jie. It was advised by Professor Lyu Maobin and Professor Deng Fang.

The challenge focused on core technical needs in narrow spaces, multiple agents, and autonomous coordination. Contestants were required to operate multiple unmanned aerial vehicles in a complex indoor environment with passages no wider than 1.5 meters and turning radii no greater than 1 meter, completing tasks autonomously, including swarm takeoff, cooperative navigation and obstacle avoidance, target recognition and operation, traversal of narrow passages, and precision landing.

The BIT team built a multi-UAV autonomous cooperative system integrating distributed communication, swarm relative positioning, cooperative trajectory planning, nonlinear model predictive control, and high-speed visual perception, demonstrating its comprehensive technical capabilities in multi-vehicle intelligent coordination, agile autonomous flight, and precise operation.

Looking ahead, the team will continue to address the technical needs of intelligent unmanned systems in complex environments, deepen its research on key technologies for autonomous cooperation of UAV swarms, and promote the application of its results in real-world scenarios such as intelligent inspection and emergency rescue.