Related papers: Trial by Flyer: Building Quadcopters From Scratch …
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…
Tertiary education institutions aim to prepare their computer science and software engineering students for working life. While much of the technical principles are covered in lower-level courses, team-based capstone projects are a common…
In recent years, using drone, also known as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), in close-distance visual inspection has became an active area in many disciplines. However, many challenges still remain before we can achieve autonomous inspection,…
Learning-based methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL), hold great promise for streamlining deployment, enhancing performance, and achieving generalization in the control of autonomous multirotor aerial vehicles. Deep RL has been…
It is often necessary for drones to complete delivery, photography, and rescue in the shortest time to increase efficiency. Many autonomous drone races provide platforms to pursue algorithms to finish races as quickly as possible for the…
This paper proposes an adaptive near-hover position controller for quadcopters, which can be deployed to quadcopters of very different mass, size and motor constants, and also shows rapid adaptation to unknown disturbances during runtime.…
Micro aerial vehicles are becoming increasingly important in search and rescue operations due to their agility, speed, and ability to access confined spaces or hazardous areas. However, designing lightweight aerial systems presents…
Quadrotors can provide services such as infrastructure inspection and search-and-rescue, which require operating autonomously in cluttered environments. Autonomy is typically achieved with receding-horizon planning, where a short plan is…
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.…
This paper presents a comprehensive design process for the integration of a robotic arm into a quadcopter, emphasizing the physical modeling, system integration, and controller development. Utilizing SolidWorks for mechanical design and…
We present a novel approach to increase the flight time of a multirotor via mid-air docking and in-flight battery switching. A main quadcopter flying using a primary battery has a docking platform attached to it. A 'flying battery' - a…
Deep Reinforcement learning has shown to be a powerful tool for developing policies in environments where an optimal solution is unclear. In this paper, we attempt to apply Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients to train a neural…
Quantum computing is a rapidly evolving field encompassing various disciplines such as physics, mathematics, computer engineering, and computer science. Teaching quantum computing in a concise and effective manner can be challenging,…
This work presents a convex optimization framework for the planning and tracking of quadcopter trajectories with continuous-time safety guarantees. Using B-spline basis functions and the differential flatness property of quadcopters, a…
Autonomous drone racing has risen as a challenging robotic benchmark for testing the limits of learning, perception, planning, and control. Expert human pilots are able to fly a drone through a race track by mapping pixels from a single…
In comparison to common quadrotors, the shape change of morphing quadrotors endows it with a more better flight performance but also results in more complex flight dynamics. Generally, it is extremely difficult or even impossible for…
While Approximate Dynamic Programming has successfully been used in many applications involving discrete states and inputs such as playing the games of Tetris or chess, it has not been used in many continuous state and input space…
Seven years ago (2016), we began integrating Robotics into our Computer Science curriculum. This paper explores the mission, initial goals and objectives, specific choices we made along the way, and why and outcomes. Of course, we were not…
To effectively control complex dynamical systems, accurate nonlinear models are typically needed. However, these models are not always known. In this paper, we present a data-driven approach based on Gaussian processes that learns models of…
In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the time-optimal trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming…