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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…
Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer significant performance advantages over rotary-wing UAVs in terms of speed, endurance, and efficiency. However, these vehicles have traditionally been severely limited with regards to…
Animal swarms displaying a variety of typical flocking patterns would not exist without underlying safe, optimal and stable dynamics of the individuals. The emergence of these universal patterns can be efficiently reconstructed with…
Natural selection has tuned many flying and swimming animals across different species to share the same narrow design space for optimal high-efficient and energy-saving locomotion, e.g., their dimensionless Strouhal numbers St that relate…
Simulators of animal movements play a valuable role in studying behavior. Advances in imitation learning for robotics have expanded possibilities for reproducing human and animal movements. A key challenge for realistic multi-animal…
Most human-robot interfaces, such as joysticks and keyboards, require training and constant cognitive effort and provide a limited degree of awareness of the robots state and its environment. Embodied interactions, instead of interfaces,…
State-of-the-art quadrotor simulators have a rigid and highly-specialized structure: either are they really fast, physically accurate, or photo-realistic. In this work, we propose a novel quadrotor simulator: Flightmare. Flightmare is…
While diffusion models are powerful in generating high-quality, diverse synthetic data for object-centric tasks, existing methods struggle with scene-aware tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Human-Object Interaction (HOI)…
This paper introduces for the first time the design, modelling, and control of a novel morphing multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that we call the OmniMorph. The morphing ability allows the selection of the configuration that…
Robots operating in human environments need various skills, like slow and fast walking, turning, side-stepping, and many more. However, building robot controllers that can exhibit such a large range of behaviors is a challenging problem…
Winged blimps operate across distinct aerodynamic regimes that cannot be adequately captured by a single model. At high speeds and small angles of attack, their dynamics exhibit strong coupling between lift and attitude, resembling…
Humanoid robots are capable of performing various actions such as greeting, dancing and even backflipping. However, these motions are often hard-coded or specifically trained, which limits their versatility. In this work, we present…
We present a wavelet-based adaptive method for computing 3D multiscale flows in complex, time-dependent geometries, implemented on massively parallel computers. While our focus is on simulations of flapping insects, it can be used for other…
The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…
In this work, we have performed numerical simulations of the flapping motion of a rectangular wing in a three-dimensional flow field using the discrete vortex method (DVM). The DVM method is computationally more convenient because it does…
Regular inspections are crucial to maintaining waste-water pipelines in good condition. The challenge is that inside a pipeline the space is narrow and may have a complex structure. The conventional methods that use pipe robots with heavy…
Limited power and computational resources, absence of high-end sensor equipment and GPS-denied environments are challenges faced by autonomous micro areal vehicles (MAVs). We address these challenges in the context of autonomous navigation…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
Little innovation has been made to low-level attitude flight control used by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), which still predominantly uses the classical PID controller. In this work we introduce Neuroflight, the first open source…
Flexible object manipulation of paper and cloth is a major research challenge in robot manipulation. Although there have been efforts to develop hardware that enables specific actions and to realize a single action of paper folding using…