Related papers: Model-free online motion adaptation for energy eff…
Limited flight range is a common problem for multicopters. To alleviate this problem, we propose a method for finding the optimal speed and heading of a multicopter when flying a given path to achieve the longest flight range. Based on a…
Autonomous unpowered flight is a challenge for control and guidance systems: all the energy the aircraft might use during flight has to be harvested directly from the atmosphere. We investigate the design of an algorithm that optimizes the…
The traditional multicopter design method usually requires a long iterative process to find the optimal design based on given performance requirements. The method is uneconomical and inefficient. In this paper, a practical method is…
Multicopters are among the most versatile mobile robots. Their applications range from inspection and mapping tasks to providing vital reconnaissance in disaster zones and to package delivery. The range, endurance, and speed a multirotor…
Multicopters are becoming increasingly important in both civil and military fields. Currently, most multicopter propulsion systems are designed by experience and trial-and-error experiments, which are costly and ineffective. This paper…
Reaching fast and autonomous flight requires computationally efficient and robust algorithms. To this end, we train Guidance & Control Networks to approximate optimal control policies ranging from energy-optimal to time-optimal flight. We…
Morphing aerial vehicles offer enhanced maneuverability and fuel efficiency compared to fixed-wing configurations. However, the trade-off between performance gains and control cost in dynamic, unsteady maneuvers remains under-explored. This…
Animals learn to adapt speed of their movements to their capabilities and the environment they observe. Mobile robots should also demonstrate this ability to trade-off aggressiveness and safety for efficiently accomplishing tasks. The aim…
Safe navigation in real-time is challenging because engineers need to work with uncertain vehicle dynamics, variable external disturbances, and imperfect controllers. A common safety strategy is to inflate obstacles by hand-defined margins.…
Modern sampling-based motion planning algorithms typically take between hundreds of milliseconds to dozens of seconds to find collision-free motions for high degree-of-freedom problems. This paper presents performance improvements of more…
In this paper, we tackle the problem of flying a quadrotor using time-optimal control policies that can be replanned online when the environment changes or when encountering unknown disturbances. This problem is challenging as the…
Aerial transportation robots using suspended cables have emerged as versatile platforms for disaster response and rescue operations. To maximize the capabilities of these systems, robots need to aggressively fly through tightly constrained…
An intuitive control method for the flying trot, which combines offline trajectory planning with real-time balance control, is presented. The motion features of running animals in the vertical direction were analysed using the…
Dynamic soaring allows seabirds to harvest mechanical energy from vertical wind shear, but field trajectories lack a benchmark for comparing flight performances across species. We derive a reduced lower bound on transport effort from a…
This paper presents the design of an extremum seeking controller based on sliding modes and cyclic search for real-time optimization of non-linear multivariable dynamic systems. These systems have arbitrary relative degree, compensated by…
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…
The albatross optimized flight maneuver -- known as dynamic soaring -- is nothing but a wonder of biology, physics, and engineering. By utilizing dynamic soaring, the bird can travel in the desired flight direction almost for free by…
Multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle is a prevailing type of aircraft with wide real-world applications. Energy efficiency is a critical aspect of its performance, determining the range and duration of the missions that can be performed. In…
This paper presents a novel trajectory planning method for aerial perching. Compared with the existing work, the terminal states and the trajectory durations can be adjusted adaptively, instead of being determined in advance. Furthermore,…
This paper studies high-speed online planning in dynamic environments. The problem requires finding time-optimal trajectories that conform to system dynamics, meeting computational constraints for real-time adaptation, and accounting for…