Related papers: Robust Active Visual Perching with Quadrotors on I…
The techniques of precision agriculture include the possibility to execute crop monitoring tasks through the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These platforms are flexible, easy to use and low-cost, and they are the best…
Active target sensing is the task of discovering and classifying an unknown number of targets in an environment and is critical in search-and-rescue missions. This paper develops a deep reinforcement learning approach to plan informative…
This paper presents the design and implementation of an assisted control technology for a small multirotor platform for aerial inspection of fixed energy infrastructure. Sensor placement is supported by a theoretical analysis of expected…
The success of surveillance applications involving small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) depends on how long the limited on-board power would persist. To cope with this challenge, alternative renewable sources of lift are sought. One…
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) have become the de facto vehicle for remote operations involving oceanography, inspection, and monitoring tasks. These vehicles operate in different and often challenging environments; hence, the design…
Safe flight in dynamic environments requires unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to make effective decisions when navigating cluttered spaces with moving obstacles. Traditional approaches often decompose decision-making into hierarchical…
This article addresses the visual area coverage problem using a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are assumed to be equipped with a downward facing camera covering all points of interest within a circle on the ground. The…
Most applications in autonomous navigation using mounted cameras rely on the construction and processing of geometric 3D point clouds, which is an expensive process. However, there is another simpler way to make a space navigable quickly:…
Agile mapless navigation in cluttered 3D environments poses significant challenges for autonomous drones. Conventional mapping-planning-control pipelines incur high computational cost and propagate estimation errors. We present AERO-MPPI, a…
This paper introduces a quadrotor's autonomous take-off and landing system on a moving platform. The designed system addresses three challenging problems: fast pose estimation, restricted external localization, and effective obstacle…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent glass obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation. Researchers have investigated the use of non-contact sensors and…
Reliable pipeline inspection is critical to safe energy transportation, but is constrained by long distances, complex terrain, and risks to human inspectors. Unmanned aerial vehicles provide a flexible sensing platform, yet reliable…
Based on the need for high resolution underwater visual surveys, this study presents the adaptation of an existing SPARUS II autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) into an entirely hovering AUV fully capable of performing autonomous, close…
This paper develops an autonomous tethered aerial visual assistant for robot operations in unstructured or confined environments. Robotic tele-operation in remote environments is difficult due to lack of sufficient situational awareness,…
An important capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is autonomous landing while avoiding collision with obstacles in the process. Such capability requires real-time local trajectory planning. Although trajectory-planning…
We study the nonlinear observability of a systems states in view of how well they are observable and what control inputs would improve the convergence of their estimates. We use these insights to develop an observability-aware…
We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous…
This paper develops and compares two motion planning algorithms for a tethered UAV with and without the possibility of the tether contacting the confined and cluttered environment. Tethered aerial vehicles have been studied due to their…
Autonomous target tracking with quadrotors has wide applications in many scenarios, such as cinematographic follow-up shooting or suspect chasing. Target motion prediction is necessary when designing the tracking planner. However, the…
An important focus of current research in the field of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is to increase the safety of their operation in general unstructured environments. Especially indoors, where GPS cannot be used for localization, reliable…