Related papers: Nuclear Environments Inspection with Micro Aerial …
Autonomous missions of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are prone to collisions owing to environmental disturbances and localization errors. Consequently, a UAV that can endure collisions and perform recovery control in critical aerial…
In order to enable Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) to assist in complex, unknown, unstructured environments, they must be able to navigate with guaranteed safety, even when faced with a cluttered environment they have no prior knowledge of.…
We address one of the main challenges towards autonomous quadrotor flight in complex environments, which is flight through narrow gaps. While previous works relied on off-board localization systems or on accurate prior knowledge of the gap…
Fault-tolerant control is crucial for safety-critical systems, such as quadrotors. State-of-art flight controllers can stabilize and control a quadrotor even when subjected to the complete loss of a rotor. However, these methods rely on…
Neutronic calculations for reactors are a daunting task when using Monte Carlo (MC) methods. As high-performance computing has advanced, the simulation of a reactor is nowadays more readily done, but design and optimization with multiple…
High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small…
Many scenarios require a robot to be able to explore its 3D environment online without human supervision. This is especially relevant for inspection tasks and search and rescue missions. To solve this high-dimensional path planning problem,…
If autonomous vehicles are to be widely accepted, we need to ensure their safe operation. For this reason, verification and validation (V&V) approaches must be developed that are suitable for this domain. Model checking is a formal…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with high-resolution sensors enable extensive data collection from previously inaccessible areas at a remarkable spatio-temporal scale, promising to revolutionize fields such as precision agriculture…
Robotic inspection of radioactive areas enables operators to be removed from hazardous environments; however, planning and operating in confined, cluttered environments remain challenging. These systems must autonomously reconstruct the…
In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous exploration of unknown environments with an aerial robot equipped with a sensory set that produces large point clouds, such as LiDARs. The main goal is to gradually explore an area while…
Inspecting indoor environments such as tunnels, industrial facilities, and construction sites is essential for infrastructure monitoring and maintenance. While manual inspection in these environments is often time-consuming and potentially…
An important focus of current research in the field of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is to increase the safety of their operation in general unstructured environments. Especially indoors, where GPS cannot be used for localization, reliable…
In this work we propose a holistic framework for autonomous aerial inspection tasks, using semantically-aware, yet, computationally efficient planning and mapping algorithms. The system leverages state-of-the-art receding horizon…
An air cargo inspection system combining two nuclear reaction based techniques, namely Fast-Neutron Resonance Radiography and Dual-Discrete-Energy Gamma Radiography is currently being developed. This system is expected to allow detection of…
We present a perception constrained visual predictive control (PCVPC) algorithm for quadrotors to enable aggressive flights without using any position information. Our framework leverages nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to…
We tackle the problem of minimum-time flight for a quadrotor through a sequence of waypoints in the presence of obstacles while exploiting the full quadrotor dynamics. Early works relied on simplified dynamics or polynomial trajectory…
Deploying robotic missions can be challenging due to the complexity of controlling robots with multiple degrees of freedom, fusing diverse sensory inputs, and managing communication delays and interferences. In nuclear inspection, robots…
Indoor exploration is an important task in disaster relief, emergency response scenarios, and Search And Rescue (SAR) missions. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) systems can aid first responders by maneuvering autonomously in areas inside…
In this paper, we develop a position estimation system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles formed by hardware and software. It is based on low-cost devices: GPS, commercial autopilot sensors and dense optical flow algorithm implemented in an…