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Teaching a multi-fingered dexterous robot to grasp objects in the real world has been a challenging problem due to its high dimensional state and action space. We propose a robot-learning system that can take a small number of human…
Decentralized deployment of drone swarms usually relies on inter-agent communication or visual markers that are mounted on the vehicles to simplify their mutual detection. This letter proposes a vision-based detection and tracking algorithm…
This paper proposes Drone Squadron Optimization, a new self-adaptive metaheuristic for global numerical optimization which is updated online by a hyper-heuristic. DSO is an artifact-inspired technique, as opposed to many algorithms used…
Autonomous landing is a capability that is essential to achieve the full potential of multi-rotor drones in many social and industrial applications. The implementation and testing of this capability on physical platforms is risky and…
Assistive robot manipulators must be able to autonomously pick and place a wide range of novel objects to be truly useful. However, current assistive robots lack this capability. Additionally, assistive systems need to have an interface…
Human-to-human communications are enriched with affects and emotions, conveyed, and perceived through both verbal and nonverbal communication. It is our thesis that drone swarms can be used to communicate information enriched with effects…
We present a novel approach to increase the flight time of a multirotor via mid-air docking and in-flight battery switching. A main quadcopter flying using a primary battery has a docking platform attached to it. A 'flying battery' - a…
This work focuses on the study of tethered fights of a micro quadcopter, with the aim of supplying continuous power to a small-sized aerial robot. Multiple features for facilitating the interaction between a tethered micro quadcopter and a…
To teach robots skills, it is crucial to obtain data with supervision. Since annotating real world data is time-consuming and expensive, enabling robots to learn in a self-supervised way is important. In this work, we introduce a robot…
The vast majority of visual animals actively control their eyes, heads, and/or bodies to direct their gaze toward different parts of their environment. In contrast, recent applications of reinforcement learning in robotic manipulation…
Drones are a promising technology for autonomous data collection and indoor sensing. In situations when human-controlled UAVs may not be practical or dependable, such as in uncharted or dangerous locations, the usage of autonomous UAVs…
Ego-motion estimation is vital for drones when flying in GPS-denied environments. Vision-based methods struggle when flight speed increases and close-by objects lead to difficult visual conditions with considerable motion blur and large…
This paper proposes a fault-tolerant control strategy based on a tilt-rotor quadcopter prototype, utilizing nonlinear model predictive control to maintain both attitude and position stability in the event of rotor failure. The control…
Robotic skill learning has been increasingly studied but the demonstration collections are more challenging compared to collecting images/videos in computer vision and texts in natural language processing. This paper presents a skill…
This paper proposes the ProxFly, a residual deep Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based controller for close proximity quadcopter flight. Specifically, we design a residual module on top of a cascaded controller (denoted as basic controller) to…
The driving objective of the Fly's Eye Project is a high resolution, high coverage time-domain survey in multiple optical passbands: our goal is to cover the entire visible sky above the 30 deg horizontal altitude with a cadence of 3 min.…
Current motion capture (MoCap) systems generally require markers and multiple calibrated cameras, which can be used only in constrained environments. In this work we introduce a drone-based system for 3D human MoCap. The system only needs…
Keypoint detection is an essential building block for many robotic applications like motion capture and pose estimation. Historically, keypoints are detected using uniquely engineered markers such as checkerboards or fiducials. More…
We propose to perform imitation learning for dexterous manipulation with multi-finger robot hand from human demonstrations, and transfer the policy to the real robot hand. We introduce a novel single-camera teleoperation system to collect…
The paper proposes a novel concept of docking drones to make this process as safe and fast as possible. The idea behind the project is that a robot with a soft gripper grasps the drone in midair. The human operator navigates the robotic arm…