The Blackbird Dataset: A Large-Scale Dataset for UAV Perception in Aggressive Flight

The Blackbird unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) dataset is a large-scale, aggressive indoor flight dataset collected using a custom-built quadrotor platform for use in evaluation of agile perception. Inspired by the potential of future high-speed fully-autonomous drone racing, the Blackbird dataset contains over 10 h of flight data from 168 flights over 17 flight trajectories and 5 environments at velocities up to 7.0 m \(\mathrm{s}^{-1}\). Each flight includes sensor data from 120 Hz stereo and downward-facing photorealistic virtual cameras, 100 Hz IMU, \(\sim \)190 Hz motor speed sensors, and 360 Hz millimeter-accurate motion capture ground truth. Camera images for each flight were photorealistically rendered using FlightGoggles [1] across a variety of environments to facilitate easy experimentation of high performance perception algorithms. The dataset is available for download at http://blackbird-dataset.mit.edu/.