The 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025), the prestigious international conference in the field of robotics, was recently held in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. The innovation team from the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) stood out and won the championship with a perfect score in the IROS 2025 Aerial Autonomy Challenge.

IROS, known as the "Olympics of Robotics", was first launched in 1988 and is held annually. Recognized as one of the world's largest and most influential robotics research conferences, it encompasses full-stack research from perception, control, and learning to system implementation.

The IROS 2025 Aerial Autonomy Challenge was an important component of this year's conference, attracting high-level teams from institutions such as the University of Hong Kong, Harbin Institute of Technology, BIT, the National University of Defense Technology, and the Singapore University of Technology and Design.

The challenge focuses on three core technological areas: "environmental adaptability", "maneuverability", and "disturbance resistance". The participating drones are required to complete fully autonomous flight tasks in various typical complex environments. These include key test scenarios such as navigating through structural obstacles, flying through dense forests, maintaining stable control under wind disturbances, navigating complex terrains, and passing through narrow slanted frames. The tasks are designed to assess the systems' abilities in perception, decision-making, planning, and control within real dynamic environments, promoting the advancement of drones from "specialized" to "general-purpose" capabilities.

The BIT team has pushed drone performance to its limits and to new heights by developing advanced techniques for high-precision radar-inertial localization, mapping, planning and control. By deeply integrating "perception, localization, mapping, planning, and control" through a finite state machine, their drone navigates dynamic and static obstacles swiftly and stably. Their efforts earned them a perfect score and the championship, marking BIT's best-ever performance in the competition.

Comprising seven graduate students and five supervisors, the team specializes in autonomous intelligent unmanned systems and multi-agent cooperative control. They have published several research achievements in top international conferences and journals such as IEEE-TAC, IEEE-TRO, Automatica, and IROS and have won over 10 top awards in national competitions.