Related papers: Autonomous Hybrid Ground/Aerial Mobility in Unknow…
Exploiting contacts with environment structures provides extra force support to a UAV, often reducing the power consumption and hence extending the mission time. This paper investigates one such way to exploit flat surfaces in the…
A novel coupled path planning and energy management problem for a hybrid unmanned air vehicle is considered, where the hybrid vehicle is powered by a dual gas/electric system. Such an aerial robot is envisioned for use in an urban setting…
Terrestrial-aerial bimodal vehicles bloom in both academia and industry because they incorporate both the high mobility of aerial vehicles and the long endurance of ground vehicles. In this work, we present an autonomous and adaptive…
Terrestrial and aerial bimodal vehicles have gained widespread attention due to their cross-domain maneuverability. Nevertheless, their bimodal dynamics significantly increase the complexity of motion planning and control, thus hindering…
This article aims to develop novel path planning algorithms required to deploy multiple unmanned vehicles in Global Positioning System (GPS) denied environments. Unmanned vehicles (ground or aerial) are ideal platforms for executing…
Amphibious ground-aerial vehicles fuse flying and driving modes to enable more flexible air-land mobility and have received growing attention recently. By analyzing the existing amphibious vehicles, we highlight the autonomous fly-driving…
Air-land bimodal vehicles provide a promising solution for navigating complex environments by combining the flexibility of aerial locomotion with the energy efficiency of ground mobility. However, planning dynamically feasible, smooth,…
Autonomous navigation through unknown environments is a challenging task that entails real-time localization, perception, planning, and control. UAVs with this capability have begun to emerge in the literature with advances in lightweight…
This paper addresses modeling and control of a six-degree-of-freedom unmanned aerial vehicle capable of vertical take-off and landing in the presence of wind disturbances. We design a hybrid vehicle that combines the benefits of both the…
Autonomous exploration of unknown environments has been widely applied in inspection, surveillance, and search and rescue. In exploration task, the basic requirement for robots is to detect the unknown space as fast as possible. In this…
Fast and accurate path planning is important for ground robots to achieve safe and efficient autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments. However, most existing methods exploiting either 2D or 2.5D maps struggle to balance…
Today, low-altitude fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are largely limited to primitively follow user-defined waypoints. To allow fully-autonomous remote missions in complex environments, real-time environment-aware navigation is…
The DARPA Subterranean Challenge is leading the development of robots capable of mapping underground mines and tunnels up to 8km in length and identify objects and people. Developing these autonomous abilities paves the way for future…
This paper proposes a path planning algorithm for multi-agent unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) to autonomously cover a search area, while considering obstacle avoidance, as well as the capabilities and energy consumption of the employed…
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the…
Self-driving vehicles are a maturing technology with the potential to reshape mobility by enhancing the safety, accessibility, efficiency, and convenience of automotive transportation. Safety-critical tasks that must be executed by a…
While autonomous multi-robots can achieve safe and coordinated navigation, they often struggle to adapt to unforeseen conditions and to capture operator-driven objectives in unstructured environments. We present a Virtual Reality (VR)-based…
We present a method for learning to drive on smooth terrain while simultaneously avoiding collisions in challenging off-road and unstructured outdoor environments using only visual inputs. Our approach applies a hybrid model-based and…
Cooperating small-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will open up new application fields within next-generation Intelligent Transportation Sytems (ITSs), e.g., airborne near field delivery. In order to allow the exploitation of the…
Autonomous vehicles have been actively investigated over the past few decades. Several recent works show the potential of autonomous vehicles in urban environments with impressive experimental results. However, these works note that…