FEUP researchers win IEEE robotics award for drone navigation

Researchers from the University of Porto's Faculty of Engineering (FEUP) have received the Best Paper Award from the Portuguese chapter of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. The award was presented during the 17th International APCA Conference on Automatic Control and Soft Computing (CONTROLO 2026) held in Coimbra.

The winning research, conducted by Conrado Guimarães da Costa, Gabriel M. Fernandes, and Rui Carvalho da Costa in collaboration with Armando Sousa, focuses on autonomous drone navigation. The study, titled “Vision-Based Landmark Tracking and Guidance of a Quadcopter using Deep Reinforcement Learning,” utilizes computer vision and deep reinforcement learning to enable nano-drones to identify and follow visual landmarks for autonomous flight.

To validate the approach, the team utilized a Crazyflie quadcopter. This integration of control engineering and artificial intelligence aims to advance robotic autonomy in environments where human intervention is not possible.