Related papers: How ornithopters can perch autonomously on a branc…
This paper describes a set of experiments involving small helicopters landing automated landing at unusual attitudes. By leveraging the increased agility of small air vehicles, we show that it is possible to automatically land a small…
Flying robots, such as quadrotor drones, offer new possibilities for human-robot interaction but often pose safety risks due to fast-spinning propellers, rigid structures, and noise. In contrast, lighter-than-air flapping-wing robots,…
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear…
Aerial insects exhibit highly agile maneuvers such as sharp braking, saccades, and body flips under disturbance. In contrast, insect-scale aerial robots are limited to tracking non-aggressive trajectories with small body acceleration. This…
Payload grasping and transportation with quadcopters is an active research area that has rapidly developed over the last decade. To grasp a payload without human interaction, most state-of-the-art approaches apply robotic arms that are…
This paper presents a lifting-wing multirotor UAV that allows long-range flight. The UAV features a lifting wing in a special mounting angle that works together with rotors to supply lift when it flies forward, achieving a reduction in…
This paper invented a new rolling control mechanism of two section articulated-wing ornithopter, which is analogues to aileron control in plane, however, similar control mechanism leads to opposite result, indicating the ornithopter…
The flight of biological butterflies represents a unique aerodynamic regime where high-amplitude, low-frequency wingstrokes induce significant body undulations and inertial fluctuations. While existing tailless flapping-wing micro air…
Flapping-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAVs) provide exceptional maneuverability and aerodynamic efficiency but pose significant challenges for onboard control due to nonlinear dynamics and stringent Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP)…
This work presents an actuation framework for a bioinspired flapping drone called Aerobat. This drone, capable of producing dynamically versatile wing conformations, possesses 14 body joints and is tail-less. Therefore, in our robot, unlike…
Accurate estimation of aerodynamic forces is essential for advancing the control, modeling, and design of flapping-wing aerial robots with dynamic morphing capabilities. In this paper, we investigate two distinct methodologies for force…
Stability of flapping flight, a natural requirement for flying insects, is one of the major challenges for designing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). To better understand how a flying insect could stabilize itself during hover, we have…
Bio-inspired methods can provide efficient solutions to perform autonomous landing for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Flying insects such as honeybees perform vertical landings by keeping flow divergence constant. This leads to an exponential…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
This paper presents, for the first time, the soft planar vertical take-off and landing (Soft-PVTOL) aircraft. This concept captures the soft aerial vehicle's fundamental dynamics with a minimum number of states and inputs but retains the…
Unmanned micro aerial vehicle research is an active area of development due to the vast potential applications. Prior work towards realizing flapping flight has achieved some success however they have relied heavily upon the use of rotary…
For legged robots, aerial motions are the only option to overpass obstacles that cannot be circumvent with standard locomotion gaits. In these cases, the robot must perform a leap to either jump onto the obstacle or fly over it. However,…
Hybrid unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrate the efficient forward flight of fixed-wing and vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capabilities of multicopter UAVs. This paper presents the modeling, control and simulation of a new type of…
Perching on structures such as trees, beams, and ledges is essential for extending the endurance of aerial robots by enabling energy conservation in standby or observation modes. A tethered tensile perching mechanism offers a simple,…
Electroadhesion (EA) provides electrically switchable adhesion and is a promising mechanism for perching micro aerial robots on smooth surfaces. However, practical implementations of soft and stretchable EA pads for aerial perching remain…