Leonardo Drone Contest 2021: Politecnico di Milano team architecture

In this paper, the winning solution of the second edition of the Leonardo Drone Contest (LDC), an autonomous drone competition, is presented. The participating teams were asked to design and build an autonomous system, capable of accomplishing complex tasks in an indoor urban-like environment. To reach this goal, the designed system should be capable of navigating in a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environment with autonomous decision making, online planning and collision avoidance capabilities. In this light, the authors describe the competition, its rules and objectives, as well as the proposed solution in terms of hardware, software and algorithms.