GPS-Denied Drone Autonomy — EKF, ORB-SLAM3 & MPC

September 1, 2024 · 1 min read

Co-developing an autonomous drone platform for GPS-denied environments with the AEA student team at Politecnico di Milano.

  • State estimation: an EKF fusing IMU, GPS, barometer, magnetometer, and stereo visual odometry (ORB-SLAM3) pose estimates, deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano.
  • Planning & control: an MPC-based path planner (CasADi), validated in Gazebo Harmonic with ROS 2 and deployed on Pixhawk/PX4.
  • Leading the bring-up from simulation to real-world flight.

C++ · CUDA · Python · ROS 2 · CasADi · PX4

Sensor Fusion Visual Odometry MPC PX4
Lorenzo Ortolani
Authors
Lorenzo Ortolani (he/him)
Roboticist · Physical AI & VLA for Humanoids
I build Physical AI — robots that perceive, reason, and act in the real world. My focus is advancing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies so that a single humanoid can learn a diverse library of skills and choose the right one for whatever industrial task it faces, generalizing far beyond a single demonstration. I co-founded TalOS Robotics AI to put this in operators’ hands, and I work across the full stack: locomotion and navigation, learned manipulation, sim-to-real, and the agent tooling that wraps it all together.