Related papers: Onboard Flight Control of a Small Quadrotor Using …

Small flying robots can perform landing maneuvers using bio-inspired optical flow by maintaining a constant divergence. However, optical flow is typically estimated from frame sequences recorded by standard miniature cameras. This requires…

This paper describes the hardware design and flight demonstration of a small quadrotor with imaging sensors for urban mapping, hazard avoidance, and target tracking research. The vehicle is equipped with five cameras, including two pairs of…

As environmental disasters happen more frequently and severely, seeking the source of pollutants or harmful particulates using plume tracking becomes even more important. Plume tracking on small quadrotors would allow these systems to…

Autonomous flight of pocket drones is challenging due to the severe limitations on on-board energy, sensing, and processing power. However, tiny drones have great potential as their small size allows maneuvering through narrow spaces while…

This paper describes the design and implementation of a ground-related odometry sensor suitable for micro aerial vehicles. The sensor is based on a ground-facing camera and a single-board Linux-based embedded computer with a multimedia…

Autonomous quadrotor flight in confined spaces such as pipes and tunnels presents significant challenges due to unsteady, self-induced aerodynamic disturbances. Very recent advances have enabled flight in such conditions, but they either…

Optical flow captures the motion of pixels in an image sequence over time, providing information about movement, depth, and environmental structure. Flying insects utilize this information to navigate and avoid obstacles, allowing them to…

Fault-tolerant control is crucial for safety-critical systems, such as quadrotors. State-of-art flight controllers can stabilize and control a quadrotor even when subjected to the complete loss of a rotor. However, these methods rely on…

The main contribution of this paper is a high frequency, low-complexity, on-board visual-inertial odometry system for quadrotor micro air vehicles. The system consists of an extended Kalman filter (EKF) based state estimation algorithm that…

Payload grasping and transportation with quadcopters is an active research area that has rapidly developed over the last decade. To grasp a payload without human interaction, most state-of-the-art approaches apply robotic arms that are…

Purpose. This paper explores the capability of smartphones as computing devices for a quadcopter, specifically in terms of the ability of drones to maintain a position known as the position hold function. Image processing can be performed…

This paper considers the problem of controlling a quadrotor to go through a window and land on a planar target, the landing pad, using an Image-Based Visual Servo (IBVS) controller that relies on sensing information from two on-board…

Cooperative Localization is a promising approach to achieving safe quadrotor formation flight through precise positioning via low-cost inter-drone sensors. This paper develops an observability-aware control principle tailored to quadrotor…

In practical applications, autonomous quadrotors are still facing significant challenges, such as the detection and avoidance of very small and even dynamic obstacles (e.g., tree branches, power lines). In this paper, we propose a compact,…

We address one of the main challenges towards autonomous quadrotor flight in complex environments, which is flight through narrow gaps. While previous works relied on off-board localization systems or on accurate prior knowledge of the gap…

This paper presents a novel morphing quadrotor, named MorphoCopter, covering its design, modeling, control, and experimental tests. It features a unique single rotary joint that enables rapid transformation into an ultra-narrow profile.…

Nano quadcopters are small, agile, and cheap platforms that are well suited for deployment in narrow, cluttered environments. Due to their limited payload, these vehicles are highly constrained in processing power, rendering conventional…

Although quadrotors, and aerial robots in general, are inherently active agents, their perceptual capabilities in literature so far have been mostly passive in nature. Researchers and practitioners today use traditional computer vision…

Quadrotors are agile. Unlike most other machines, they can traverse extremely complex environments at high speeds. To date, only expert human pilots have been able to fully exploit their capabilities. Autonomous operation with on-board…

Autonomous missions of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are prone to collisions owing to environmental disturbances and localization errors. Consequently, a UAV that can endure collisions and perform recovery control in critical aerial…