Related papers: Design and Control of a Midair-Reconfigurable Quad…
Autonomous docking between Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and ground robots is essential for heterogeneous systems, yet most existing approaches target wheeled platforms whose limited mobility constrains exploration in complex terrains.…
Unlike squared (or alike) quadrotors, elongated bi-copters leverage natural superiority in crossing tight spaces. To date, extensive works have focused on the design, modeling, and control of bi-copters. Besides, a proper motion planner…
Recent research has proposed teleoperation of robotic and aerial vehicles using head motion tracked by a head-mounted display (HMD). First-person views of the vehicles are usually captured by onboard cameras and presented to users through…
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…
Air ducts are integral to modern buildings but are challenging to access for inspection. Small quadrotor drones offer a potential solution, as they can navigate both horizontal and vertical sections and smoothly fly over debris. However,…
Purpose. This paper explores the capability of smartphones as computing devices for a quadcopter, specifically in terms of the ability of drones to maintain a position known as the position hold function. Image processing can be performed…
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…
Autonomous landing on mobile platforms is crucial for extending quadcopter operational flexibility, yet conventional methods are often too inefficient for highly dynamic scenarios. The core limitation lies in the prevalent…
In this work, we evaluate the use of aerial drone hover constraints in a multisensor fusion of ground robot and drone data to improve the localization performance of a drone. In particular, we build upon our prior work on cooperative…
The task of flying in tight formations is challenging for teams of quadrotors because the complex aerodynamic wake interactions can destabilize individual team members as well as the team. Furthermore, these aerodynamic effects are highly…
This paper presents the concept of a tethered variable inertial attitude control mechanism for a modular jumping-limbed robot designed for planetary exploration in low-gravity environments. The system, named SPLITTER, comprises two sub-10…
Modeling the kinematics and dynamics of robotics systems with suspended loads using dual quaternions has not been explored so far. This paper introduces a new innovative control strategy using dual quaternions for UAVs with cable-suspended…
This paper considers the controllability analysis and fault tolerant control problem for a class of hexacopters. It is shown that the considered hexacopter is uncontrollable when one rotor fails, even though the hexacopter is over-actuated…
Triphibious robots capable of multi-domain motion and cross-domain transitions are promising to handle complex tasks across diverse environments. However, existing designs primarily focus on dual-mode platforms, and some designs suffer from…
This paper studies the kinematic tracking control problem for aerial manipulators. Existing kinematic tracking control methods, which typically employ proportional-derivative feedback or tracking-error-based feedback strategies, may fail to…
This work presents an actuation framework for a bioinspired flapping drone called Aerobat. This drone, capable of producing dynamically versatile wing conformations, possesses 14 body joints and is tail-less. Therefore, in our robot, unlike…
Flying manipulators are aerial drones with attached rigid-bodied robotic arms and belong to the latest and most actively developed research areas in robotics. The rigid nature of these arms often lack compliance, flexibility, and smoothness…
This project aimed to develop an automated cinematography platform using an unmanned aerial vehicle. Quadcopters are a great platform for shooting aerial scenes but are difficult to maneuver smoothly and can require expertise to pilot. We…
Soft grippers are receiving growing attention due to their compliance-based interactive safety and dexterity. Hybrid gripper (soft actuators enhanced by rigid constraints) is a new trend in soft gripper design. With right structural…
This paper develops a novel physics-based approach for fault-resilient multi-quadcopter coordination in the presence of abrupt quadcopter failure. Our approach consists of two main layers: (i) high-level physics-based guidance to safely…