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We introduce FalconWing, an ultra-light (150 g) indoor fixed-wing UAV platform for vision-based autonomy. Controlled indoor environment enables year-round repeatable UAV experiment but imposes strict weight and maneuverability limits on the…
Accurate and stable spacecraft pointing is a requirement of many astronomical observations. Pointing particularly challenges nanosatellites because of an unfavorable surface area to mass ratio and proportionally large volume required for…
Railguns are capable to far exceed the muzzle energies of current naval deck guns. Therefore one of the most promising scenario for the future application of railguns in naval warfare is the long range artillery. Hypervelocity projectiles…
Photonic inverse design typically seeks designs parameterized by binary arrays, where the values of each element correspond to the presence or absence of material at a particular point in space. Gradient-based approaches to photonic inverse…
Building on a preliminary paper design of a downlink from a swarm of low-mass interstellar probes for returning scientific data from the vicinity of Proxima Centauri, the most critical technology issues are summarized, and their…
Orbit determination of spacecraft in orbit has been mostly dependent on either GNSS satellite signals or ground station telemetry. Both methods present their limitations, however: GNSS signals can only be used effectively in earth orbit,…
The miniaturization and integration of beam steering devices have consistently been the focus of the field. Conventional methods alter the eigenmode of the optical cavity by regulating the refractive index. Due to the weak nonlinear effect…
The miniaturization of mechanical machines is critical for advancing nanotechnology and reducing device footprints. Traditional efforts to downsize gears and micromotors have faced limitations at around 0.1 mm for over thirty years due to…
We discuss the in-flight autonomous assembly as the means to build advanced planetary science payloads to explore the outer regions of the solar system. These payloads are robotically constructed from modular parts delivered by a group of…
Small-scale autonomous airborne vehicles, such as micro-drones, are expected to be a central component of a broad spectrum of applications ranging from exploration to surveillance and delivery. This class of vehicles is characterized by…
Balloon-borne astronomy is a unique tool that allows for a level of image stability and significantly reduced atmospheric interference without the often prohibitive cost and long development time-scale that are characteristic of space-borne…
Recent studies of optimization methods and GNC of spacecraft near small bodies focusing on descent, landing, rendezvous, etc., with key safety constraints such as line-of-sight conic zones and soft landings have shown promising results;…
Perceiving and mapping the surroundings are essential for enabling autonomous navigation in any robotic platform. The algorithm class that enables accurate mapping while correcting the odometry errors present in most robotics systems is…
Laser-driven acceleration holds great promise for significantly improving accelerating gradient. However, scaling the conventional process of structure-based acceleration in vacuum down to optical wavelengths requires a substantially…
For unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectory design, the total propulsion energy consumption and initial-final location constraints are practical factors to consider. However, unlike traditional offline designs, these two constraints are…
Inverse-designed nanophotonic devices offer promising solutions for analog optical computation. High-density photonic integration is critical for scaling such architectures toward more complex computational tasks and large-scale…
In this paper, we consider the classical spacecraft rendezvous problem in which the so-called active spacecraft has to approach the target spacecraft which is moving in an elliptical orbit around a planet by using the minimum possible…
This paper investigates the use of Reinforcement Learning for the robust design of low-thrust interplanetary trajectories in presence of severe disturbances, modeled alternatively as Gaussian additive process noise, observation noise,…
This paper develops a robust optimization based method to design orbits on which the sensory perception of the desired physical quantities are maximized. It also demonstrates how to incorporate various constraints imposed by many spacecraft…
This paper presents the design and development of an intelligent subsystem that includes a novel low-power radar sensor integrated into an autonomous racing perception pipeline to robustly estimate the position and velocity of dynamic…