  This paper presents a novel system for autonomous, vision-based drone racing
combining learned data abstraction, nonlinear filtering, and time-optimal
trajectory planning. The system has successfully been deployed at the first
autonomous drone racing world championship: the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.
Contrary to traditional drone racing systems, which only detect the next gate,
our approach makes use of any visible gate and takes advantage of multiple,
simultaneous gate detections to compensate for drift in the state estimate and
build a global map of the gates. The global map and drift-compensated state
estimate allow the drone to navigate through the race course even when the
gates are not immediately visible and further enable to plan a near
time-optimal path through the race course in real time based on approximate
drone dynamics. The proposed system has been demonstrated to successfully guide
the drone through tight race courses reaching speeds up to 8m/s and ranked
second at the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge.
