Related papers: How ornithopters can perch autonomously on a branc…
Compared with fixed-wing flight, flapping flight can generate a higher lift and is also more maneuverable, largely resulting from the benefits of wing rotation. By analyzing the real wing kinematics of fruit flies, we found that the wing…
Drilling, grinding, and setting anchors on vertical walls are fundamental processes in everyday construction work. Manually doing these works is error-prone, potentially dangerous, and elaborate at height. Today, heavy mobile ground robots…
Stretching and retracting wingspan has been widely observed in the flight of birds and bats, and its effects on the aerodynamic performance particularly lift generation are intriguing. The rectangular flat-plate flapping wing with a…
In this work, we have performed numerical simulations of the flapping motion of a rectangular wing in a three-dimensional flow field using the discrete vortex method (DVM). The DVM method is computationally more convenient because it does…
Manipulation performance improvement is crucial for aerial robots. For aerial manipulators, the baselink position and attitude errors directly affect the precision at the end effector. To address this stability problem, fixed-body…
Long arrays of identical, self-propelling flapping flyers are inherently unstable and thus unlikely to exist without active control mechanisms. One approach to enable long in-line formations is to enforce a constant separation between the…
Flapping-wing insects, birds, and robots are thought to offset the high power cost of oscillatory wing motion by using elastic elements for energy storage and return. Insects possess highly resilient elastic regions in their flight anatomy…
We present the first decentralized multi-copter flock that performs stable autonomous outdoor flight with up to 10 flying agents. By decentralized and autonomous we mean that all members navigate themselves based on the dynamic information…
Biological studies show that hummingbirds can perform extreme aerobatic maneuvers during fast escape. Given a sudden looming visual stimulus at hover, a hummingbird initiates a fast backward translation coupled with a 180-degree yaw turn,…
We study experimentally a four-winged flapping flyer with chord-wise flexible wings in a self-propelled setup. For a given physical configuration of the flyer (i.e. fixed distance between the forewing and hindwing pairs and fixed wing…
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…
Centipede-like robots offer an effective and robust solution to navigation over complex terrain with minimal sensing. However, when climbing over obstacles, such multi-legged robots often elevate their center-of-mass into unstable…
Aerial robots the size of a honeybee (~100 mg) have advantages over larger robots because of their small size, low mass and low materials cost. Previous iterations have demonstrated controlled flight but were difficult to fabricate because…
Precision landing is a remaining challenge in autonomous drone flight. Fiducial markers provide a computationally cheap way for a drone to locate a landing pad and autonomously execute precision landings. However, most work in this field…
Birds employ rapid pitch-up motions for different purposes: perching birds use this motion to decelerate and come to a complete stop while hunting birds, like bald eagles, employ it to catch prey and swiftly fly away. Motivated by these…
We investigate the effect of wing twist flexibility on lift and efficiency of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle capable of liftoff. Wings used previously were chosen to be fully rigid due to modeling and fabrication constraints. However,…
We introduce a Task-Level Iterative Learning Control method for dynamic manipulation of ropes. We demonstrate this method on a non-planar rope manipulation task called the flying knot. Using a single human demonstration and a simplified…
Robots are increasingly being deployed in agriculture to support sustainable practices and improve productivity. They offer strong potential to enable precise, efficient, and environmentally friendly operations. However, most existing…
Fixtures for constraining the movement of parts have been extensively investigated in robotics, since they are essential for using robots in automated manufacturing. This paper deals with the design and optimized synthesis of a special type…
The visual cue of optical flow plays a major role in the navigation of flying insects, and is increasingly studied for use by small flying robots as well. A major problem is that successful optical flow control seems to require distance…