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Visual active tracking is a growing research topic in robotics due to its key role in applications such as human assistance, disaster recovery, and surveillance. In contrast to passive tracking, active tracking approaches combine vision and…

Rapid aerial grasping through robots can lead to many applications that utilize fast and dynamic picking and placing of objects. Rigid grippers traditionally used in aerial manipulators require high precision and specific object geometries…

Perching is a promising solution for a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to save energy and extend operation time. This paper proposes a quadrotor that can perch on planar structures using the ceiling effect. Compared with the existing…

Decentralized deployment of drone swarms usually relies on inter-agent communication or visual markers that are mounted on the vehicles to simplify their mutual detection. This letter proposes a vision-based detection and tracking algorithm…

In this work, a novel, end-to-end motion planning method is proposed for quadrotor navigation in cluttered environments. The proposed method circumvents the explicit sensing-reconstructing-planning in contrast to conventional navigation…

This paper provides new results for control of complex flight maneuvers for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The flight maneuvers are defined by a concatenation of flight modes or primitives, each of which is achieved by a…

Aerial manipulation requires force-aware capabilities to enable safe and effective grasping and physical interaction. Previous works often rely on heavy, expensive force sensors unsuitable for typical quadrotor platforms, or perform…

This paper explores the application of vision-based system identification techniques in quadrotor modeling and control. Through experiments and analysis, we address the complexities and limitations of quadrotor modeling, particularly in…

This study explores modeling and control for quadrotor acrobatics, focusing on executing flip maneuvers. Flips are an elegant way to deliver sensor probes into no-fly or hazardous zones, like volcanic vents. Successful flips require…

This paper proposes a framework for 3D obstacle avoidance in the presence of partial observability of environment obstacles. The method focuses on the utility of the Artificial Potential Function (APF) controller in a practical setting…

Dynamic obstacle avoidance on quadrotors requires low latency. A class of sensors that are particularly suitable for such scenarios are event cameras. In this paper, we present a deep learning -- based solution for dodging multiple dynamic…

Performing acrobatic maneuvers with quadrotors is extremely challenging. Acrobatic flight requires high thrust and extreme angular accelerations that push the platform to its physical limits. Professional drone pilots often measure their…

This work introduces a cooperative inspection system designed to efficiently control and coordinate a team of distributed heterogeneous UAV agents for the inspection of 3D structures in cluttered, unknown spaces. Our proposed approach…

Small aerial robots are particularly well-suited for search and rescue in confined and hazardous environments due to their agility, low cost, and ability to traverse through cluttered spaces that are inaccessible to larger platforms.…

With the advent of intelligent transport, quadrotors are becoming an attractive solution while lifting or dropping payloads during emergency evacuations, construction works, etc. During such operations, dynamic variations in (possibly…

Quadrotors are agile platforms. With human experts, they can perform extremely high-speed flights in cluttered environments. However, fully autonomous flight at high speed remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a motion…

In this paper we address the problem of dot painting on a wall by a quadrotor Micro Air Vehicle (MAV), using on-board low cost sensors (monocular camera and IMU) for localization. A method is proposed to cope with uncertainties on the…

We present VisFly, a quadrotor simulator designed to efficiently train vision-based flight policies using reinforcement learning algorithms. VisFly offers a user-friendly framework and interfaces, leveraging Habitat-Sim's rendering engines…

This paper explores the mathematical modelling and 3D design of a tilt-rotor quadrotor aircraft. The aircraft is a VTOL design and has capacity for one pilot. The design incorporates a part manual part automatic computerised flight control…

A long-cherished vision of drones is to autonomously traverse through clutter to reach every corner of the world using onboard sensing and computation. In this paper, we combine onboard 3D lidar sensing and sim-to-real reinforcement…