Related papers: Trial by Flyer: Building Quadcopters From Scratch …
Quadcopters are increasingly used for applications ranging from hobby to industrial products and services. This paper serves as a tutorial on the design, simulation, implementation, and experimental outdoor testing of digital quadcopter…
Mechanics of materials is a classic course of engineering presenting the fundamentals of strain and stress analysis to junior undergraduate students in several engineering majors. So far, material deformation and strain have been only…
Learning to control robots without requiring engineered models has been a long-term goal, promising diverse and novel applications. Yet, reinforcement learning has only achieved limited impact on real-time robot control due to its high…
A flight trajectory defines how exactly a quadrocopter moves in the three-dimensional space from one position to another. Automatic flight trajectory planning faces challenges such as high computational effort and a lack of precision.…
This paper explains the integration process of an autonomous quadcopter platform and the design of Arduino based novel software architecture that enables the execution of advanced control laws on low-cost off-the-shelf products based…
Quadcopters have been studied for decades thanks to their maneuverability and capability of operating in a variety of circumstances. However, quadcopters suffer from dynamical nonlinearity, actuator saturation, as well as sensor noise that…
To properly simulate and implement a quadcopter flight control for intended load and flight conditions, the quadcopter model must have parameters on various relationships including propeller thrust-torque, thrust-PWM, and thrust--angular…
Majority of today's fixed-pitch, electric-power quadrotors have short flight endurance ($<$ 1 hour) which greatly limits their applications. This paper presents a design methodology for the construction of a long-endurance quadrotor using…
Flying quadrotors in tight formations is a challenging problem. It is known that in the near-field airflow of a quadrotor, the aerodynamic effects induced by the propellers are complex and difficult to characterize. Although machine…
Capstone courses in undergraduate software engineering are a critical final milestone for students. These courses allow students to create a software solution and demonstrate the knowledge they accumulated in their degrees. However, a…
In this work, we specialize contributions from prior work on data-driven trajectory generation for a quadrotor system with motor saturation constraints. When motors saturate in quadrotor systems, there is an ``uncontrolled drift" of the…
Autonomous drone racing has attracted increasing interest as a research topic for exploring the limits of agile flight. However, existing studies primarily focus on obstacle-free racetracks, while the perception and dynamic challenges…
This paper proposes the ProxFly, a residual deep Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based controller for close proximity quadcopter flight. Specifically, we design a residual module on top of a cascaded controller (denoted as basic controller) to…
In this paper, we present a novel developmental reinforcement learning-based controller for a quadcopter with thrust vectoring capabilities. This multirotor UAV design has tilt-enabled rotors. It utilizes the rotor force magnitude and…
This paper presents a multi-step procedure to construct the dynamic motion model of an autonomous quadcopter, identify the model parameters, and design a model-based nonlinear trajectory tracking controller. The aim of the proposed method…
Quadrotors have demonstrated remarkable versatility, yet their full aerobatic potential remains largely untapped due to inherent underactuation and the complexity of aggressive maneuvers. Traditional approaches, separating trajectory…
This work presents a structured systematic process for undergraduate capstone research projects embodying computational thinking (CT) practices. Students learn to conduct research with a decision support system utilizing CT. The system is…
Quadrotors are highly nonlinear dynamical systems that require carefully tuned controllers to be pushed to their physical limits. Recently, learning-based control policies have been proposed for quadrotors, as they would potentially allow…
This paper introduces a learning-based low-level controller for quadcopters, which adaptively controls quadcopters with significant variations in mass, size, and actuator capabilities. Our approach leverages a combination of imitation…
Landing a quadrotor on an inclined surface is a challenging maneuver. The final state of any inclined landing trajectory is not an equilibrium, which precludes the use of most conventional control methods. We propose a deep reinforcement…