Related papers: Fast and Agile Vision-Based Flight with Teleoperat…
The ability to enter in contact with and manipulate physical objects with a flying robot enables many novel applications, such as contact inspection, painting, drilling, and sample collection. Generally, these aerial robots need more…
Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in complex missions that demand reliable autonomous navigation and robust obstacle avoidance. However, traditional modular pipelines often incur cumulative latency, whereas…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become very popular for many military and civilian applications including in agriculture, construction, mining, environmental monitoring, etc. A desirable feature for UAVs is the ability to navigate and…
Search and rescue environments exhibit challenging 3D geometry (e.g., confined spaces, rubble, and breakdown), which necessitates agile and maneuverable aerial robotic systems. Because these systems are size, weight, and power (SWaP)…
Trajectory generation for fully autonomous flights of tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) presents substantial challenges due to their highly nonlinear aerodynamics. In this paper, we introduce, to the best of our knowledge, the…
Aircraft that can launch ballistically and convert to autonomous, free flying drones have applications in many areas such as emergency response, defense, and space exploration, where they can gather critical situational data using onboard…
This paper introduces a high-performance artificial intelligence operating system tailored for low-altitude aviation, designed to address key challenges such as real-time task execution, computational efficiency, and seamless modular…
This paper presents an omnidirectional aerial manipulation platform for robust and responsive interaction with unstructured environments, toward the goal of contact-based inspection. The fully actuated tilt-rotor aerial system is equipped…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) are attaining more and more maneuverability and sensory ability as a promising teleoperation platform for intelligent interaction with the environments. This work presents a novel 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF)…
This paper introduces a safety filter to ensure collision avoidance for multirotor aerial robots. The proposed formalism leverages a single Composite Control Barrier Function from all position constraints acting on a third-order nonlinear…
In practical applications, autonomous quadrotors are still facing significant challenges, such as the detection and avoidance of very small and even dynamic obstacles (e.g., tree branches, power lines). In this paper, we propose a compact,…
Visual inertial odometry (VIO) is widely used for the state estimation of multicopters, but it may function poorly in environments with few visual features or in overly aggressive flights. In this work, we propose a perception-aware…
We present a VR-based teleoperation system for multirotor flight that renders a third-person view (TPV) of the vehicle together with a live 3D reconstruction of its surroundings. The system runs on an embedded GPU (Jetson Orin NX) with…
This paper introduces a collision avoidance system for navigating a multicopter in cluttered outdoor environments based on the recent memory-less motion planner, rectangular pyramid partitioning using integrated depth sensors (RAPPIDS). The…
Multirotors are usually desired to enter confined narrow tunnels that are barely accessible to humans in various applications including inspection, search and rescue, and so on. This task is extremely challenging since the lack of geometric…
Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait…
Quadrotors hold significant promise for several applications such as agriculture, search and rescue, and infrastructure inspection. Achieving autonomous operation requires systems to navigate safely through complex and unfamiliar…
Autonomous agile flight brings up fundamental challenges in robotics, such as coping with unreliable state estimation, reacting optimally to dynamically changing environments, and coupling perception and action in real time under severe…
Rapid aerial grasping through robots can lead to many applications that utilize fast and dynamic picking and placing of objects. Rigid grippers traditionally used in aerial manipulators require high precision and specific object geometries…
Visual inspection of confined spaces such as aircraft wings is ergonomically challenging for human mechanics. This work presents a novel crane robot that can travel the entire span of the aircraft wing, enabling mechanics to perform…