Related papers: Trial by Flyer: Building Quadcopters From Scratch …
A quadcopter is an under-actuated system with only four control inputs for six degrees of freedom, and yet the human control of a quadcopter is simple enough to be learned with some practice. In this work, we consider the problem of human…
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…
Quadrotors are agile. Unlike most other machines, they can traverse extremely complex environments at high speeds. To date, only expert human pilots have been able to fully exploit their capabilities. Autonomous operation with on-board…
A didactic multiscale approach for drone modeling is proposed. Specifically, we investigate the drone structure at both macroscopic and microscopic scales, by making use of finite element and atomistic simulations, respectively. The…
This paper presents a framework for controlled emergency landing of a quadcopter, experiencing a rotor failure, away from sensitive areas. A complete mathematical model capturing the dynamics of the system is presented that takes the…
A major challenge in autonomous flights is unknown disturbances, which can jeopardize safety and lead to collisions, especially in obstacle-rich environments. This paper presents a disturbance-aware motion planning and control framework…
The ability to perform aggressive movements, which are called aggressive flights, is important for quadrotors during navigation. However, aggressive quadrotor flights are still a great challenge to practical applications. The existing…
Autonomous unpowered flight is a challenge for control and guidance systems: all the energy the aircraft might use during flight has to be harvested directly from the atmosphere. We investigate the design of an algorithm that optimizes the…
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a CAD-based human-robot interface that allows non-expert users to teach a robot in a manner similar to that used by human beings to teach each other. Design/methodology/approach - Intuitive…
Most reinforcement learning(RL)-based methods for drone racing target fixed, obstacle-free tracks, leaving the generalization to unknown, cluttered environments largely unaddressed. This challenge stems from the need to balance racing speed…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of enabling a drone to fly through a tilted narrow gap, without a traditional planning and control pipeline. To this end, we propose an end-to-end policy network, which imitates from the traditional…
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have proven to be an effective tool for performing safe control synthesis for nonlinear systems. However, guaranteeing safety in the presence of disturbances and input constraints for high relative degree…
Robust adaptive control methods are essential for maintaining quadcopter performance under external disturbances and model uncertainties. However, fragmented evaluations across tasks, simulators, and implementations hinder systematic…
The Crazyflie quadcopter is widely recognized as a leading platform for nano-quadcopter research. In early 2025, the Crazyflie Brushless was introduced, featuring brushless motors that provide around 50% more thrust compared to the brushed…
This paper presents a novel morphing quadrotor, named MorphoCopter, covering its design, modeling, control, and experimental tests. It features a unique single rotary joint that enables rapid transformation into an ultra-narrow profile.…
Timing guarantees are crucial to cyber-physical applications that must bound the end-to-end delay between sensing, processing and actuation. For example, in a flight controller for a multirotor drone, the data from a gyro or inertial sensor…
Nano-quadcopters are versatile platforms attracting the interest of both academia and industry. Their tiny form factor, i.e., $\,$10 cm diameter, makes them particularly useful in narrow scenarios and harmless in human proximity. However,…
Payload grasping and transportation with quadcopters is an active research area that has rapidly developed over the last decade. To grasp a payload without human interaction, most state-of-the-art approaches apply robotic arms that are…
In this article, we describe the components and procedures for building a drone ready for networking experimentation. In particular, our drone design includes multiple technologies and elements such as 4G/5G connectivity for real-time data…
Small multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), mainly quadcopters, are nowadays ubiquitous in research on aerial autonomy, including serving as scaled-down models for much larger aircraft such as vertical-take-off-and-lift vehicles for…