Uploaded March 2024 | Updated September 2026, 10 hours ago
Millimeter wave (mmWave) radars have attracted significant attention from both academia and industry due to their capability to operate in extreme weather conditions. However, they face challenges in terms of sparsity and noise interference, which hinder their application in the field of micro aerial vehicle (MAV) autonomous navigation. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach to dense and accurate mmWave radar point cloud construction via cross-modal learning. Specifically, we introduce diffusion models, which possess state-of-the-art performance in generative modeling, to predict LiDAR-like point clouds from paired raw radar data. We also incorporate the most recent diffusion model inference accelerating techniques to ensure that the proposed method can be implemented on MAVs with limited computing resources. We validate the proposed method through extensive benchmark comparisons and real-world experiments, demonstrating its superior performance and generalization ability. Code and pretrained models will be available at github.com/ZJU-FAST-Lab/Radar-Diffusion.
Millimeter wave (mmWave) radars have attracted significant attention from both academia and industry due to their capability to operate in extreme weather conditions. However, they face challenges in terms of sparsity and noise interference, which hinder their application in the field of micro aerial vehicle (MAV) autonomous navigation. To this end, this paper proposes a novel approach to dense and accurate mmWave radar point cloud construction via cross-modal learning. Specifically, we introduce diffusion models, which possess state-of-the-art performance in generative modeling, to predict LiDAR-like point clouds from paired raw radar data. We also incorporate the most recent diffusion model inference accelerating techniques to ensure that the proposed method can be implemented on MAVs with limited computing resources. We validate the proposed method through extensive benchmark comparisons and real-world experiments, demonstrating its superior performance and generalization ability. Code and pretrained models will be available at github.com/ZJU-FAST-Lab/Radar-Diffusion.










![Canfly: A Can-sized Autonomous Mini Coaxial Helicopter
Video for the IROS 2023 submission.
The video presents the paper Canfly: A Can-sized Autonomous Mini Coaxial Helicopter.
The development of autonomous rotary-wing UAVs has shown an evident tendency in miniaturization. However, the side effects brought by miniaturization, such as decreased load capability, shorter flight duration, and reduced autonomous ability, seriously hinder the process. In this paper, we firstly investigate into the configuration of different rotary-wing aircraft and optimize the configuration selection. Afterward, with several elaborate mechanisms contributing for the miniaturization, we present the hardware design and control strategy of a mini coaxial helicopter, which is 62% smaller than the smallest autonomous quadrotor so far [1] in the collision area. Abundant experiments reveal that it achieves impressive traversability and is capable of carrying autonomous tasks in unknown dense scenarios, while maintaining satisfactory performance regarding loadability and flight duration. Canfly: A Can-sized Autonomous Mini Coaxial Helicopter](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Wx2LKPgmtd4/mqdefault.jpg)