Jingao Xu

Drone-based rapid and accurate environmental edge detection is highly advantageous for tasks such as disaster relief and autonomous navigation. Current methods, using radars or cameras, raise deployment costs and burden lightweight drones with high computational demands. In this paper, we propose AirTouch, a system that transforms the ground effect from a stability “foe” in traditional flight control views, into a “friend” for accurate and efficient edge detection. Our key insight is that analyzing drone basic attitude sensor readings and flight commands allows us to detect ground effect changes. Such changes typically indicate the drone flying over a boundary of two materials, making this information valuable for edge detection. We approach this insight through theoretical analysis, algorithm design, and implementation, fully leveraging the ground effect as a new sensing modality without compromising drone flight stability, thereby achieving accurate and efficient scene edge detection. We also compare this new sensing modality with vision-based methods to clarify its exclusive advantages in resource efficiency and detection capability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our system achieves a high detection accuracy with mean detection distance errors of 0.051m, outperforming the baseline method performance by 86%. With such detection performance, our system requires only 43 mW power consumption, contributing to this new sensing modality for low-cost and highly efficient edge detection.

As drone-based applications proliferate, paramount contactless sensing of airborne drones from the ground becomes indispensable. This work demonstrates concentrating on propeller rotational speed will substantially improve drone sensing performance and proposes an event-camera-based solution, EventPro. EventPro features two components: Count Every Rotation achieves accurate, real-time propeller speed estimation by mitigating ultra-high sensitivity of event cameras to environmental noise. Every Rotation Counts leverages these speeds to infer both internal and external drone dynamics. Extensive evaluations in real-world drone delivery scenarios show that EventPro achieves a sensing latency of 3 ms and a rotational speed estimation error of merely 0.23%. Additionally, EventPro infers drone flight commands with 96.5% precision and improves drone tracking accuracy by over 22% when combined with other sensing modalities. Demo: https://eventpro25.github.io/EventPro/.

With the evolution of mobile embodied intelligence, agents such as drones and autonomous robots are transitioning toward high agility. This shift imposes stringent demands on embodied perception, requiring high-accuracy and low-latency feedback loops for reliable interaction. Event-based vision has emerged as a transformative paradigm. Its microsecond-level temporal resolution and high dynamic range render it ideal for embodied perception tasks on high-agility mobile platforms. However, asynchronous nature, substantial noise, lack of persistent semantic information, and large data volume pose challenges for processing on resource-constrained mobile agents. This article surveys the literature from 2014–2025 and presents a comprehensive overview of event-based mobile embodied perception. We organize review around four key pillars: event abstraction methods, perception algorithm advancements, hardware and software acceleration strategies, and mobile applications . We discuss critical tasks including visual odometry, object tracking, optical flow, and 3D reconstruction, while highlighting challenges associated with sensor fusion and real-time deployment. Furthermore, we outline future research directions, such as improving event cameras with advanced optics and leveraging neuromorphic computing for efficient processing. To support ongoing research, we provide an open-source Online Sheet with recent developments. We hope this survey serves as a reference, facilitating adoption of event-based vision across diverse mobile embodied applications.