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As off-the-shelf (OTS) autopilots become more widely available and user-friendly and the drone market expands, safer, more efficient, and more complex motion planning and control will become necessary for fixed-wing aerial robotic…
Atmospheric turbulence, especially in the near-surface boundary layer is known to be under-sampled due to the need to capture a wide separation in length and time-scales and limitation in the number of sensors. Over the past decade, the use…
While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in several missions, their inability of reliable and consistent autonomous landing poses a major setback for deploying such systems truly autonomously. In this paper we present…
Optimal decision-making presents a significant challenge for autonomous systems operating in uncertain, stochastic and time-varying environments. Environmental variability over time can significantly impact the system's optimal decision…
We consider warm-started optimized trajectory planning for autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) by combining the advantages of two types of planners: an A* implementation that quickly finds the shortest piecewise linear path, and an optimal…
This paper proposes an observer-based framework for solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) when an accurate model is not available. We first propose to use a Moving Horizon Estimation-Model Predictive Control…
Successful aerial manipulation largely depends on how effectively a controller can tackle the coupling dynamic forces between the aerial vehicle and the manipulator. However, this control problem has remained largely unsolved as the…
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 work proposes a decision-making framework for partially observable systems in continuous time with discrete state and action spaces. As optimal decision-making becomes intractable for large state spaces we employ approximation methods…
A control design approach to achieve fully autonomous take-off and flight maneuvers with a tethered aircraft is presented and demonstrated in real-world flight tests with a small-scale prototype. A ground station equipped with a controlled…
In recent years, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are frequently used in many different applications of photogrammetry such as building damage monitoring, archaeological mapping and vegetation monitoring. In this paper, a new…
Small body exploration is a pertinent challenge due to low gravity environments and strong sensitivity to perturbations like Solar Radiation Pressure (SRP). Thus, autonomous methods are being developed to enable safe navigation and control…
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) need to interact with other traffic participants who can be either cooperative or aggressive, attentive or inattentive. Such different characteristics can lead to quite different interactive behaviors. Hence, to…
Efficient trajectory generation in complex dynamic environments remains an open problem in the unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The perception of the USV is usually interfered with by the swing of the hull and the ambient weather, making it…
The decreased size and cost of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) has enabled the use of swarms of unmanned autonomous vehicles to accomplish a variety of tasks. By utilizing swarming behaviors, it is…
In this paper, we study a joint detection, mapping and navigation problem for a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a low complexity radar and flying in an unknown environment. The goal is to optimize its trajectory with the…
Consider an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that searches for an unknown number of targets at unknown positions in 3D space. A particle filter uses imperfect measurements about the targets to update an intensity function that represents the…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) are attaining more and more maneuverability and sensory ability as a promising teleoperation platform for intelligent interaction with the environments. This work presents a novel 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF)…
Cross-country soaring flights rely on intermittent atmospheric updrafts to cover long distances, producing trajectories that alternate between rapid relocation and local exploration. From a large dataset of paraglider, hang glider, and…
Recent work has considered personalized route planning based on user profiles, but none of it accounts for human trust. We argue that human trust is an important factor to consider when planning routes for automated vehicles. This paper…