Related papers: Universal Flying Objects: Modular Multirotor Syste…
Foundation models (FM) have shown immense human-like capabilities for generating digital media. However, foundation models that can freely sense, interact, and actuate the physical domain is far from being realized. This is due to 1)…
Designing robust controllers for precise trajectory tracking with quadrotors is challenging due to nonlinear dynamics and underactuation, and becomes harder with flexible cable-suspended payloads that add degrees of freedom and hybrid…
Autonomous landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles on maritime vessels is challenging due to the coupled motion of the vehicle and landing platform in open-sea conditions. This paper presents a reinforcement-learning-based approach for…
We introduce and analyze a model for self-reconfigurable robots made up of unit-cube modules. Compared to past models, our model aims to newly capture two important practical aspects of real-world robots. First, modules often do not occupy…
In this work, we propose a dynamic landing solution without the need for onboard exteroceptive sensors and an expensive computation unit, where all localization and control modules are carried out on the ground in a non-inertial frame. Our…
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…
In this paper, we propose a single UniFied transfOrmer (UFO), which is capable of processing either unimodal inputs (e.g., image or language) or multimodal inputs (e.g., the concatenation of the image and the question), for vision-language…
We propose a new position control strategy for VTOL-UAVs using IMU and GPS measurements. Since there is no sensor that measures the attitude, our approach does not rely on the knowledge (or reconstruction) of the system orientation as…
Cooperative transportation via multiple aerial robots has the potential to support various payloads and reduce the chances of them being dropped. Furthermore, autonomously controlled robots render the system scalable with respect to the…
This paper investigates one of the most challenging tasks in dynamic manipulation -- catching large-momentum moving objects. Beyond the realm of quasi-static manipulation, dealing with highly dynamic objects can significantly improve the…
Capabilities of long-range flight and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) are essential for Urban Air Mobility (UAM). Tiltrotor VTOLs have the advantage of balancing control simplicity and system complexity due to their redundant control…
Robust cooperative formation control is investigated in this paper for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles in close formation flight to save energy. A novel cooperative control method is developed. The concept of virtual structure is…
Aerial robotics for transporting suspended payloads as the form of freely-floating manipulator are growing great interest in recent years. However, the force/torque caused by payload and residual dynamics will introduce unmodeled…
Enabling vertical take-off and landing while providing the ability to fly long ranges opens the door to a wide range of new real-world aircraft applications while improving many existing tasks. Tiltrotor vertical take-off and landing (VTOL)…
An all-electric unmanned aerial system with both VTOL and Fixed wing capabilities is designed and optimized for long range surveillance and relief operations. The UAV is equipped with onboard computers and sensors and is capable of carrying…
Existing FPV object tracking methods heavily rely on handcrafted modular pipelines, which incur high onboard computation and cumulative errors. While learning-based approaches have mitigated computational delays, most still generate only…
Cargo drones are designed to carry payloads with predefined shape, size, and/or mass. This lack of flexibility requires a fleet of diverse drones tailored to specific cargo dimensions. Here we propose a new reconfigurable drone based on a…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been actively studied as moving cloudlets to provide application offloading opportunities and to enhance the security level of user equipments (UEs). In this correspondence, we propose a hybrid UAV-aided…
This paper investigates tracking controls for an arbitrary number of cooperating quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles with a suspended rigid body payload. Assuming that a rigid body is connected to multiple quadrotors by rigid massless links,…
Soft robots are known for their ability to perform tasks with great adaptability, enabled by their distributed, non-uniform stiffness and actuation. Bending is the most fundamental motion for soft robot design, but creating robust, and…