Team JSK at MBZIRC 2020: Interception of Fast Flying Target using Multilinked Aerial Robot

The JSK (Jouhou System Kougaku) team from The University of Tokyo was selected as one of the 32 finalist teams out of 134 applicants to participate in the second edition of the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge (MBZIRC) held in 2020. One of the challenges (Challenge 1) required an aerial robot to detect, follow and catch a yellow ball hanging underneath a fast-moving drone. In this challenge, we developed an articulated aerial robot that could intercept the target. This study presents reliable vision-based detection, target-trajectory estimation, fast interception-planning, and control. Furthermore, we discuss outdoor experiments for evaluating our hardware and software systems, as well as the competition results in Abu Dhabi. With our developed system, we achieved third place in Challenge 1, as one of only four teams in the entire competition to successfully intercept the moving target.