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Hybrid unmanned aircraft can significantly increase the potential of micro air vehicles, because they combine hovering capability with a wing for fast and efficient forward flight. However, these vehicles are very difficult to control,…
This paper describes a set of experiments involving small helicopters landing automated landing at unusual attitudes. By leveraging the increased agility of small air vehicles, we show that it is possible to automatically land a small…
This paper presents the design concept, modeling and motion planning solution for the aerial robotic chain. This design represents a configurable robotic system of systems, consisting of multi-linked micro aerial vehicles that…
Unmanned aerial vehicles have been demonstrated successfully in a variety of tasks, including surveying and sampling tasks over large areas. These vehicles can take many forms. Quadrotors' agility and ability to hover makes them well suited…
Morphing aerial robots have the potential to transform autonomous flight, enabling navigation through cluttered environments, perching, and seamless transitions between aerial and terrestrial locomotion. Yet mid-flight reconfiguration…
This paper improves safe motion primitives-based teleoperation of a multirotor by developing a hierarchical collision avoidance method that modulates maximum speed based on environment complexity and perceptual constraints. Safe speed…
Despite the promise of magnetically actuated miniature helical robots for minimally invasive interventions, state-of-the-art electromagnetic actuation systems are often space-inefficient and geometrically fixed. These constraints hinder…
Multilegged robots have the ability to perform stable locomotion on relatively rough terrain. However, the complexity of legged robots over wheeled or tracked robots make them difficult to control. This paper presents OpenSHC (Open-source…
Modular reconfigurable manipulators enable quick adaptation and versatility to address different application environments and tailor to the specific requirements of the tasks. Task performance significantly depends on the manipulator's…
This article aims to derive a practical tracking control algorithm for flexible air-breathing hypersonic vehicles (FAHVs) with lumped disturbances, unmeasurable states and actuator failures. Based on the framework of the backstepping…
Turbojet-powered VTOL UAVs have garnered increased attention in heavy-load transport and emergency services, due to their superior power density and thrust-to-weight ratio compared to existing electronic propulsion systems. The main…
Recent quadrotors have transcended conventional designs, emphasizing more on foldable and reconfigurable bodies. The state of the art still focuses on the mechanical feasibility of such designs with limited discussions on the tracking…
Despite great progress in multimodal tracking, these trackers remain too heavy and expensive for resource-constrained devices. To alleviate this problem, we propose LightFC-X, a family of lightweight convolutional RGB-X trackers that…
Manipulation and grasping with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) currently require accurate positioning and are often executed at reduced speed to ensure successful grasps. This is due to the fact that typical UAVs can only accommodate rigid…
Reliable midair docking between small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is essential for modular aerial cooperation and manipulation, but it requires precise relative-pose control and repeatable platform under tight thrust and payload…
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…
We study the design of robust and agile controllers for hybrid underactuated systems. Our approach breaks down the task of creating a stabilizing controller into: 1) learning a mapping that is invariant under optimal control, and 2) driving…
This work presents a two part framework for online planning and execution of dynamic aerial motions on a quadruped robot. Motions are planned via a centroidal momentum-based nonlinear optimization that is general enough to produce rich sets…
Interstellar comets arrive with key ingredients for deep-space platforms already in place: volatile inventories convertible to propellant, natural rotation providing continuous attitude variation, and hyperbolic trajectories that carry them…
With the promise of greater safety and adaptability, modular reconfigurable uncrewed air vehicles have been proposed as unique, versatile platforms holding the potential to replace multiple types of monolithic vehicles at once.…