Related papers: Trial by Flyer: Building Quadcopters From Scratch …
Robotic simulators are crucial for academic research and education as well as the development of safety-critical applications. Reinforcement learning environments -- simple simulations coupled with a problem specification in the form of a…
A physical selfie stick extends the user's reach, enabling the acquisition of personal photos that include more of the background scene. Similarly, a quadcopter can capture photos from vantage points unattainable by the user; but…
Bio-engineered robots are under rapid development due to their maneuver ability through uneven surfaces. This advancement paves the way for experimenting with versatile electrical system developments with various motors. In this research…
This study attempted to develop fair, relevant, and content-valid assessment tools for capstone project courses. Toward this goal, new rating instruments based on the concept of rubrics were proposed. To ensure that the new instruments were…
Over the past decade, machine learning has demonstrated impressive results, often surpassing human capabilities in sensing tasks relevant to autonomous flight. Unlike traditional aerospace software, the parameters of machine learning models…
Traditional control methods are inadequate in many deployment settings involving control of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). In such settings, CPS controllers must operate and respond to unpredictable interactions, conditions, or failure…
This project aimed to develop an automated cinematography platform using an unmanned aerial vehicle. Quadcopters are a great platform for shooting aerial scenes but are difficult to maneuver smoothly and can require expertise to pilot. We…
Reaching fast and autonomous flight requires computationally efficient and robust algorithms. To this end, we train Guidance & Control Networks to approximate optimal control policies ranging from energy-optimal to time-optimal flight. We…
During the 2017-18 academic year we carried out a series of coding activities, lasting about 3 months, in a third of the Giulia Falletti primary school in Barolo in Turin (Gena et a., 2020). These activities aimed to teach students not only…
Quadcopters can suffer from loss of propellers in mid-flight, thus requiring a need to have a system that detects single and multiple propeller failures and an adaptive controller that stabilizes the propeller-deficient quadcopter. This…
The widespread adoption of quadrotors for diverse applications, from agriculture to public safety, necessitates an understanding of the aerodynamic disturbances they create. This paper introduces a computationally lightweight model for…
Training and transferring learning-based policies for quadrotors from simulation to reality remains challenging due to inefficient visual rendering, physical modeling inaccuracies, unmodeled sensor discrepancies, and the absence of a…
This paper describes the hardware design and flight demonstration of a small quadrotor with imaging sensors for urban mapping, hazard avoidance, and target tracking research. The vehicle is equipped with five cameras, including two pairs of…
We present fully autonomous source seeking onboard a highly constrained nano quadcopter, by contributing application-specific system and observation feature design to enable inference of a deep-RL policy onboard a nano quadcopter. Our…
Using the properties of differential flatness, a controllable system, such as a quadcoper model, may be transformed into a linear equivalent system via a coordinate change and an input mapping. This is a straightforward advantage for the…
Motivated by the increasing use of quadrotors for payload delivery, we consider a joint trajectory generation and feedback control design problem for a quadrotor experiencing aerodynamic wrenches. Unmodeled aerodynamic drag forces from…
Drones have gained popularity in a wide range of field ranging from aerial photography, aerial mapping, and investigation of electric power lines. Every drone that we know today is carrying out some kind of control algorithm at the low…
First-order reinforcement learning with differentiable simulation is promising for quadrotor control, but practical progress remains fragmented across task-specific settings. To support more systematic development and evaluation, we present…
In trajectory planning and control design for unmanned air vehicles, highly simplified models are typically used to represent the vehicle dynamics and the operating environment. The goal of this work is to perform real-time, but realistic…
Over the last 15 years, Software Carpentry has evolved from a week-long training course at the US national laboratories into a worldwide volunteer effort to raise standards in scientific computing. This article explains what we have learned…