Related papers: Range, Endurance, and Optimal Speed Estimates for …
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, have the potential to significantly reduce the cost and time of making last-mile deliveries and responding to emergencies. Despite this potential, little work has gone into developing vehicle routing…
Search and rescue operations require mobile robots to navigate unstructured indoor and outdoor environments. In particular, actively stabilized multirotor drones need precise movement data to balance and avoid obstacles. Combining radial…
Majority of today's fixed-pitch, electric-power quadrotors have short flight endurance ($<$ 1 hour) which greatly limits their applications. This paper presents a design methodology for the construction of a long-endurance quadrotor using…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially multicopters, have recently gained popularity for use in surveillance, monitoring, inspection, and search and rescue missions. Their maneuverability and ability to operate in confined spaces make…
Future unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) will be shared by multiple users and will have to operate in conditions where their fully-autonomous function is required. Calculation of a drones trajectory will be important but optimal…
Over the last decade, the use of autonomous drone systems for surveying, search and rescue, or last-mile delivery has increased exponentially. With the rise of these applications comes the need for highly robust, safety-critical algorithms…
This article presents a multi-robot trajectory planning method which not only guarantees optimization feasibility and but also resolves deadlocks in obstacle-dense environments. The method is proposed via formulating a recursive…
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…
Drones have recently emerged as a faster, safer, and cost-efficient way for last-mile deliveries of parcels, particularly for urgent medical deliveries highlighted during the pandemic. This paper addresses a new challenge of multi-parcel…
In this paper we study multi-robot path planning for persistent monitoring tasks. We consider the case where robots have a limited battery capacity with a discharge time $D$. We represent the areas to be monitored as the vertices of a…
To properly simulate and implement a quadcopter flight control for intended load and flight conditions, the quadcopter model must have parameters on various relationships including propeller thrust-torque, thrust-PWM, and thrust--angular…
Control of systems of automated guided vehicles involves action planning at many levels. For efficient control of these systems, accurate estimation of cost parameters (speed, energy, task completion performance, \textit{et~cetera} is…
Aerial drones offer a distinct potential to reduce the delivery time and energy consumption for the delivery of time-sensitive and small products. However, there is still a need in the relevant industry to understand the performance of…
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 thrust estimation and control for the rotors of small-sized multirotors Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Accurate control of the thrust generated by each rotor during flight is one of the main challenges…
We propose a distributed control law for a heterogeneous multi-robot coverage problem, where the robots could have different energy characteristics, such as capacity and depletion rates, due to their varying sizes, speeds, capabilities, and…
Quadcopters are increasingly used for applications ranging from hobby to industrial products and services. This paper serves as a tutorial on the design, simulation, implementation, and experimental outdoor testing of digital quadcopter…
We present a novel approach to increase the flight time of a multirotor via mid-air docking and in-flight battery switching. A main quadcopter flying using a primary battery has a docking platform attached to it. A 'flying battery' - a…
Purpose of Review: To effectively synthesise and analyse multi-robot behaviour, we require formal task-level models which accurately capture multi-robot execution. In this paper, we review modelling formalisms for multi-robot systems under…
Practical deployments of coordinated fleets of mobile robots in different environments have revealed the benefits of maintaining small distances between robots, especially as they move at higher speeds. However, this is counter-intuitive in…