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One of the most challenging tasks for a flying robot is to autonomously navigate between target locations quickly and reliably while avoiding obstacles in its path, and with little to no a-priori knowledge of the operating environment. This…

This letter investigates the problem of controlling an aerial manipulator, composed of an omnidirectional tilting drone equipped with a five-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm. The robot has to interact with the environment to inspect…

Achieving short-distance flight helps improve the efficiency of humanoid robots moving in complex environments (e.g., crossing large obstacles or reaching high places) for rapid emergency missions. This study proposes a design of a flying…

This paper addresses the problem of building a speech recognition system attuned to the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Even though UAVs are becoming widespread, the task of creating voice interfaces for them is largely…

Innovative ideas are continuously emerging to produce better life conditions where essential human needs are supposed to be fulfilled with perfect scenarios leading us to propose modern strategies drawing the future of smart cities. In this…

Grasping using an aerial robot can have many applications ranging from infrastructure inspection and maintenance to precise agriculture. However, aerial grasping is a challenging problem since the robot has to maintain an accurate position…

This paper proposes a fault-tolerant control strategy based on a tilt-rotor quadcopter prototype, utilizing nonlinear model predictive control to maintain both attitude and position stability in the event of rotor failure. The control…

Autonomous exploration of unknown environments has been widely applied in inspection, surveillance, and search and rescue. In exploration task, the basic requirement for robots is to detect the unknown space as fast as possible. In this…

Humans are capable of learning a new behavior by observing others perform the skill. Robots can also implement this by imitation learning. Furthermore, if with external guidance, humans will master the new behavior more efficiently. So how…

During certain times of the year at middle and low latitudes, winds in the upper stratosphere move in nearly the opposite direction than the wind in the lower stratosphere. Here we present a method for maintaining a high-altitude balloon…

This paper presents a real-time control system for surface inspection using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are coordinated in a specific formation to collect data of the inspecting objects. The communication platform for…

A preliminary numerical study on the aerodynamics of a kite wing for high altitude wind power generators is proposed. Tethered kites are a key element of an innovative wind energy technology, which aims to capture energy from the wind at…

The urgent need for renewable energy expansion, particularly wind power, is hindered by conflicts with wildlife conservation. To address this, we developed BirdRecorder, an advanced AI-based anti-collision system to protect endangered…

Recent technological advancements in small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have led to the development of companion UAVs. Similar to conventional companion robots, companion UAVs have the potential to assist us in our daily lives and…

The periodic inspection of vessels is a fundamental task to ensure their integrity and avoid maritime accidents. Currently, these inspections represent a high cost for the ship owner, in addition to the danger that this kind of hostile…

Transporting suspended payloads is challenging for autonomous aerial vehicles because the payload can cause significant and unpredictable changes to the robot's dynamics. These changes can lead to suboptimal flight performance or even…

An array of large observational programs using ground-based and space-borne telescopes is planned in the next decade. The forthcoming wide-field sky surveys are expected to deliver a sheer volume of data exceeding an exabyte. Processing the…

Data driven robotics relies upon accurate real-world representations to learn useful policies. Despite our best-efforts, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer is still an unsolved problem, and we often need to allow our agents to explore online to…

We present a modular framework designed to enable a robot hand-arm system to learn how to catch flying objects, a task that requires fast, reactive, and accurately-timed robot motions. Our framework consists of five core modules: (i) an…

We present a fully integrated autonomous multi- robot aerial system for finding and collecting moving and static objects with unknown locations. This task addresses multiple relevant problems in search and rescue (SAR) robotics such as…