Related papers: Development of a Low-Cost Experimental Quadcopter …
Automatic off-line design is an attractive approach to implementing robot swarms. In this approach, a designer specifies a mission for the swarm, and an optimization process generates suitable control software for the individual robots…
Designing robust controllers for precise trajectory tracking with quadrotors is challenging due to nonlinear dynamics and underactuation, and becomes harder with flexible cable-suspended payloads that add degrees of freedom and hybrid…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Aircraft that can launch ballistically and convert to autonomous, free flying drones have applications in many areas such as emergency response, defense, and space exploration, where they can gather critical situational data using onboard…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
We propose a control protocol based on the prescribed performance control (PPC) methodology for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Quadrotor systems belong to the class of underactuated systems for which the original PPC methodology…
A multi-joint enabled robot requires extensive mathematical calculations to determine the end effector's position with respect to the other connective joints involved and their corresponding frames in a specific coordinate system. If a…
In this paper, we develop a position estimation system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles formed by hardware and software. It is based on low-cost devices: GPS, commercial autopilot sensors and dense optical flow algorithm implemented in an…
With the rapid development of simulation tools, the development and validation of autonomous robotic systems have become more efficient before real-world deployment. This paper presents a simulation-to-real implementation of an autonomous…
In this paper, a new hierarchical software architecture is proposed to improve the safety and reliability of a safety-critical drone system from the perspective of its source code. The proposed architecture uses formal verification methods…
This paper deals with the dynamics and controls of a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle that is connected to a fixed point on the ground via a tether. Tethered quadrotors have been envisaged for long-term aerial surveillance with high-speed…
The navigation systems of autonomous aircraft rely on the readings provided by a suite of onboard sensors to estimate the aircraft state. In the case of fixed wing vehicles, the sensor suite is composed by triads of accelerometers,…
Autonomous vehicle platoons present near- and long-term opportunities to enhance operational efficiencies and save lives. The past 30 years have seen rapid development in the autonomous driving space, enabling new technologies that will…
This paper presents a nonlinear control design for highly underactuated balance robots, which possess more numbers of unactuated degree-of-freedom (DOF) than actuated ones. To address the challenge of simultaneously trajectory tracking of…
Regular inspections are crucial to maintaining waste-water pipelines in good condition. The challenge is that inside a pipeline the space is narrow and may have a complex structure. The conventional methods that use pipe robots with heavy…
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) have become the de facto vehicle for remote operations involving oceanography, inspection, and monitoring tasks. These vehicles operate in different and often challenging environments; hence, the design…
This paper studies the robust optimal control design for uncertain nonlinear systems from a perspective of robust adaptive dynamic programming (robust-ADP). The objective is to fill up a gap in the past literature of ADP where dynamic…
Flying robots are usually rather delicate and require protective enclosures when facing the risk of collision, while high complexity and reduced payload are recurrent problems with collision-resilient flying robots. Inspired by arthropods'…
We develop data-driven algorithms for reachability analysis and control of systems with a priori unknown nonlinear dynamics. The resulting algorithms not only are suitable for settings with real-time requirements but also provide provable…
We introduce SplitFlyer--a novel quadcopter with an ability to disassemble into two self-contained bicopters through human assistance. As a subunit, the bicopter is a severely underactuated aerial vehicle equipped with only two propellers.…