Related papers: How ornithopters can perch autonomously on a branc…
Flapping wings enable flying animals and biomimetic robots to generate elevated aerodynamic forces. Measurements that demonstrate this capability are based on tethered experiments with robots and animals, and indirect force calculations…
Birds, bats and many insects can tuck their wings against their bodies at rest and deploy them to power flight. Whereas birds and bats use well-developed pectoral and wing muscles and tendons, how insects control these movements remains…
We present a novel controller for fixed-wing UAVs that enables autonomous soaring in an orographic wind field, extending flight endurance. Our method identifies soaring regions and addresses position control challenges by introducing a…
A flying trapeze act can be a challenging task for a robotics system since some act requires the performer to catch another trapeze or catcher at the end after being airborne. The objective of this paper is to design and validate a motion…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping-wings are dominated by large-scale vortical…
Flow visualisations are essential to better understand the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight. The issues inherent to animal experiments, such as poor controllability and unnatural flapping when tethered, can be avoided by using…
Dynamic soaring is a flying technique to exploit the energy available in wind shear layers, enabling potentially unlimited flight without the need for internal energy sources. We propose a framework for autonomous dynamic soaring with a…
This paper formulates a team orienteering problem with multiple fixed-wing drones and develops a branch-and-price algorithm to solve the problem to optimality. Fixed-wing drones, unlike rotary drones, have kinematic constraints associated…
Drones, like most airborne aerial vehicles, face inherent disadvantages in achieving agile flight due to their limited thrust capabilities. These physical constraints cannot be fully addressed through advancements in control algorithms…
In systems control, the dynamics of a system are governed by modulating its inputs to achieve a desired outcome. For example, to control the thrust of a quad-copter propeller the controller modulates its rotation rate, relying on a…
A control design approach to achieve fully autonomous take-off and flight maneuvers with a tethered aircraft is presented and demonstrated in real-world flight tests with a small-scale prototype. A ground station equipped with a controlled…
The autonomous formation flight of fixed-wing drones is hard when the coordination requires the actuation over their speeds since they are critically bounded and aircraft are mostly designed to fly at a nominal airspeed. This paper proposes…
Inverted landing is a challenging feat to perform in aerial robots, especially without external positioning. However, it is routinely performed by biological fliers such as bees, flies, and bats. Our previous observations of landing…
Flying vertebrates exhibit sophisticated wingbeat kinematics. Their specialized forelimbs allow for the wing morphing motion to couple with the flapping motion during their level flight, Previous flyable bionic platforms have successfully…
Utilizing wind hovering techniques of soaring birds can save energy expenditure and improve the flight endurance of micro air vehicles (MAVs). Here, we present a novel method for fully autonomous orographic soaring without a priori…
Flying animals resort to fast, large-degree-of-freedom motion of flapping wings, a key feature that distinguishes them from rotary or fixed-winged robotic fliers with limited motion of aerodynamic surfaces. However, flapping-wing…
While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in several missions, their inability of reliable and consistent autonomous landing poses a major setback for deploying such systems truly autonomously. In this paper we present…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
Autonomous landing on a moving platform presents unique challenges for multirotor vehicles, including the need to accurately localize the platform, fast trajectory planning, and precise/robust control. Previous works studied this problem…