Related papers: Deep Drone Acrobatics

Quadrotor Morpho-Transition, or the act of transitioning from air to ground through mid-air transformation, involves complex aerodynamic interactions and a need to operate near actuator saturation, complicating controller design. In recent…

Although quadrotors, and aerial robots in general, are inherently active agents, their perceptual capabilities in literature so far have been mostly passive in nature. Researchers and practitioners today use traditional computer vision…

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved unprecedented successes in a range of challenging problems, their applicability has been mainly limited to simulation or game domains due to the high sample complexity of the…

Quadrotors can provide services such as infrastructure inspection and search-and-rescue, which require operating autonomously in cluttered environments. Autonomy is typically achieved with receding-horizon planning, where a short plan is…

The quadrotor is popularly used in challenging environments due to its superior agility and flexibility. In these scenarios, trajectory planning plays a vital role in generating safe motions to avoid obstacles while ensuring flight…

Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising and powerful technique for automatically acquiring control policies that can process raw sensory inputs, such as images, and perform complex behaviors. However, extending deep RL to…

Purpose: Real-life applications using quadrotors introduce a number of disturbances and time-varying properties that pose a challenge to flight controllers. We observed that, when a quadrotor is tasked with picking up and dropping a…

Aerial manipulators are composed of an aerial multi-rotor that is equipped with a 6-DOF servo robot arm. To achieve precise position and attitude control during the arm's motion, it is critical for the system to have high performance…

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have recently been used in several civil application domains from organ delivery to remote locations to wireless network coverage. These platforms, however, are naturally unstable systems for…

Executing precise and agile flight maneuvers is critical for quadrotors in various applications. Traditional quadrotor control approaches are limited by their reliance on flat trajectories or time-consuming optimization, which restricts…

Autonomous, agile quadrotor flight raises fundamental challenges for robotics research in terms of perception, planning, learning, and control. A versatile and standardized platform is needed to accelerate research and let practitioners…

Natural flyers use soft wings to seamlessly enable a wide range of flight behaviours, including agile manoeuvres, squeezing through narrow passageways, and withstanding collisions. In contrast, conventional quadrotor designs rely on rigid…

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are often used for navigating dangerous terrains, however they are difficult to pilot. Due to complex input-output mapping schemes, limited perception, the complex system dynamics and the need to maintain a…

The rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) puts forward a higher requirement for autonomous obstacle avoidance. Due to the limited payload and power supply, small UAVs such as quadrotors usually carry simple sensors and…

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…

Though control algorithms for multirotor Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) are well understood, the configuration, parameter estimation, and tuning of flight control algorithms takes quite some time and resources. In previous work, we have shown…

This paper addresses the problem of guiding a quadrotor through a predefined sequence of waypoints in cluttered environments, aiming to minimize the flight time while avoiding collisions. Previous approaches either suffer from prolonged…

A major challenge in autonomous flights is unknown disturbances, which can jeopardize safety and lead to collisions, especially in obstacle-rich environments. This paper presents a disturbance-aware motion planning and control framework…

Demonstrating acrobatic behavior of a humanoid robot such as flips and spinning jumps requires systematic approaches across hardware design, motion planning, and control. In this paper, we present a new humanoid robot design, an…

Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and low latency, making them ideal sensors for high-speed robotic applications where conventional cameras suffer from image degradations such as motion blur. In addition, their low power…