Related papers: UAV-miniUGV Hybrid System for Hidden Area Explorat…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are gaining popularity in civil and military applications. However, uncontrolled access to restricted areas threatens privacy and security. Thus, prevention and detection of UAVs are pivotal to guarantee…
There is an increased interest in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for agriculture, military, disaster management and aerial photography around the world. UAVs are scalable, flexible and are useful in various environments where…
This work presents a 3D multi-robot exploration framework for a team of UGVs moving on uneven terrains. The framework was designed by casting the two-level coordination strategy presented in [1] into the context of multi-robot exploration.…
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…
Digital documentation of large interiors of historical buildings is an exhausting task since most of the areas of interest are beyond typical human reach. We advocate the use of autonomous teams of multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles…
The task of establishing and maintaining situational awareness in an unknown environment is a critical step to fulfil in a mission related to the field of rescue robotics. Predominantly, the problem of visual inspection of urban structures…
Terrestrial robots, i.e., unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and aerial robots, i.e., unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), operate in separate spaces. To exploit their complementary features (e.g., fields of views, communication links, computing…
Efficient exploration strategies are vital in tasks such as search-and-rescue missions and disaster surveying. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become particularly popular in such applications, promising to cover large areas at high…
Due to its mobility and agility, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has emerged as a promising technology for various tasks, such as sensing, inspection and delivery. However, a typical UAV has limited energy storage and cannot fly a long…
A tracking controller for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is developed to track moving targets undergoing unknown translational and rotational motions. The main challenges are to control both the relative positions and angles between the…
One typical application of unmanned aerial vehicles is the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission, where the objective is to improve situation awareness through information acquisition. For examples, an efficient way to…
The remarkable growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has also sparked concerns about safety measures during their missions. To advance towards safer autonomous aerial robots, this work presents a vision-based solution to ensuring safe…
We present an integrated UAV-hexapod robotic system designed for GNSS-denied maritime operations, capable of autonomous deployment and retrieval of a hexapod robot via a winch mechanism installed on a UAV. This system is intended to address…
Single visual object tracking from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) poses fundamental challenges such as object occlusion, small-scale objects, background clutter, and abrupt camera motion. To tackle these difficulties, we propose to…
UAVs have been widely used in visual inspections of buildings, bridges and other structures. In either outdoor autonomous or semi-autonomous flights missions strong GPS signal is vital for UAV to locate its own positions. However, strong…
We present a cooperative aerial-ground search-and-rescue (SAR) framework that pairs two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to achieve rapid victim localization and obstacle-aware navigation in unknown…
Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform high-altitude manipulation tasks beyond just passive visual application can reduce the time, cost, and risk of human workers. Prior research on aerial manipulation has relied on either ground…
Inspection of confined infrastructure such as culverts often requires accessing hidden spaces whose entrances are reachable primarily from elevated viewpoints. Aerial-ground cooperation enables a UAV to deploy a compact UGV for interior…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can pose a major risk for aviation safety, due to both negligent and malicious use. For this reason, the automated detection and tracking of UAV is a fundamental task in aerial security systems. Common…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are commonly used for missions in unknown environments, where an exact mathematical model of the environment may not be available. This paper provides a framework for using reinforcement learning to allow the…