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This paper highlights the significance of the rotor dynamics in control design for small-scale aerobatic helicopters, and proposes two singularity free robust attitude tracking controllers based on the available states for feedback. 1. The…
This paper is an addition to an article previously published by three of the authors that addresses the control of convertible fixed-wing aircraft with vectorized thrust. The control solution here developed extends the one presented in the…
We present a small autonomous vehicle, with the purpose of aiding teachers and researchers to easily deploy different approaches to guidance, control and positioning systems, without the hassle to develop the entire modules required for…
Agile maneuvering of the quadrotor cable-suspended system is significantly hindered by its non-smooth hybrid dynamics. While model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) circumvents explicit differentiation of complex models, achieving…
This paper addresses the design and application controller for a small-size unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). In this work, the main objective is to study the modeling and attitude controller design for a small size helicopter. Based on a…
Stop-rotor aircraft have long been proposed as the ideal vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft for missions with equal time spent in both flight regimes, such as agricultural monitoring, search and rescue, and last-mile delivery.…
Motion planning is an extremely well-studied problem in the robotics community, yet existing work largely falls into one of two categories: computationally efficient but with few if any safety guarantees, or able to give stronger guarantees…
This letter proposes a method to integrate auxiliary actuators that enhance the task space capabilities of commercial underactuated systems, leaving the internal certified low level controller untouched. The additional actuators are…
Problems associated with physical interactions using aerial mobile manipulators (AMM) are being independently addressed with respect to mobility and manipulability. Multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are a common choice for mobility…
We introduce collision-resilient aerial vehicles with icosahedron tensegrity structures, capable of surviving high-speed impacts and resuming operations post-collision. We present a model-based design approach, which guides the selection of…
Aerial manipulators, which combine robotic arms with multi-rotor drones, face strict constraints on arm weight and mechanical complexity. In this work, we study a lightweight 2-degree-of-freedom (DoF) arm mounted on a quadrotor via a…
Aerial vehicles with collision resilience can operate with more confidence in environments with obstacles that are hard to detect and avoid. This paper presents the methodology used to design a collision resilient aerial vehicle with…
This paper presents a model-based, adaptive, nonlinear controller for the bicopter stabilization and trajectory-tracking problem. The nonlinear controller is designed using the backstepping technique. Due to the non-invertibility of the…
This paper presents an uncomplicated dynamic controller for generating physically-plausible three-dimensional full-body biped character rise motions on-the-fly at run-time. Our low-dimensional controller uses fundamental reference…
In recent years, multimodal locomotion capabilities have enabled robots to maneuver in both terrestrial and aerial domains. However, most of these robots are designed only for locomotion, and few possess the manipulation capabilities…
Recent spacecraft mission concepts propose larger payloads that have lighter, less rigid structures. For large lightweight structures, the natural frequencies of their vibration modes may fall within the attitude controller bandwidth,…
This paper presents, for the first time, the soft planar vertical take-off and landing (Soft-PVTOL) aircraft. This concept captures the soft aerial vehicle's fundamental dynamics with a minimum number of states and inputs but retains the…
We present an optimization-based framework for multicopter trajectory planning subject to geometrical configuration constraints and user-defined dynamic constraints. The basis of the framework is a novel trajectory representation built upon…
Acceleration-commanded guidance laws (e.g., proportional navigation) are attractive for high-level decision making, but their direct deployment on fixed-wing UAVs is challenging because accelerations are not directly actuated and must be…
This thesis presents a unified control framework for agile and fault-tolerant flight of the Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) in aerial mode. The M4 robot is capable of transitioning between ground and aerial locomotion. The articulated…