On Your Own: Pro-Level Autonomous Drone Racing in Uninstrumented Arenas

Drone technology is proliferating in many industries, including agriculture, logistics, defense, infrastructure, and environmental monitoring. Vision-based autonomy is one of its key enablers, particularly for real-world applications. This is essential for operating in novel, unstructured environments where traditional navigation methods may be unavailable. Autonomous drone racing has become the de facto benchmark for such systems. State-of-the-art research has shown that autonomous systems can surpass human-level performance in racing arenas. However, the direct applicability to commercial and field operations is still limited, as current systems are often trained and evaluated in highly controlled environments. In our contribution, the system's capabilities are analyzed within a controlled environment—where external tracking is available for ground-truth comparison—but also demonstrated in a challenging, uninstrumented environment—where ground-truth measurements were never available. We show that our approach can match the performance of professional human pilots in both scenarios.