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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) dynamic encirclement is an emerging field with great potential. Researchers often get inspiration from biological systems, either from macro-world like fish schools or bird flocks etc, or from micro-world…
This paper describes a technique for the autonomous mission planning of unmanned aerial system swarms. Given a swarm operating in a known area, a central command system generates measurements from the swarm. If those measurements indicate…
The amount of debris in orbit has increased significantly over the years. With the recent growth of interest in space exploration, conjunction assessment has become a central issue. One important metric to evaluate conjunction risk is the…
This paper investigates the mission planning problem for spacecraft confronting orbital debris to achieve autonomous avoidance. Firstly, combined with the avoidance requirements, a closed-loop framework of autonomous avoidance for orbital…
A robust drift-safe rendezvous trajectory optimization tool is developed in this work, with applications to orbital rendezvous and proximity operations. The method is based on direct collocation and utilizes a sequential convex programming…
Collaborative SLAM enables a group of agents to simultaneously co-localize and jointly map an environment, thus paving the way to wide-ranging applications of multi-robot perception and multi-user AR experiences by eliminating the need for…
Communication constraints can significantly impact robots' ability to share information, coordinate their movements, and synchronize their actions, thus limiting coordination in Multi-Robot Exploration (MRE) applications. In this work, we…
Space debris have been becoming exceedingly dangerous over the years as the number of objects in orbit continues to rise. Active debris removal (ADR) missions have garnered significant attention as an effective way to mitigate this…
This paper presents a vision guidance and control method for autonomous robotic capture and stabilization of orbital objects in a time-critical manner. The method takes into account various operational and physical constraints, including…
Interstellar objects (ISOs) are likely representatives of primitive materials invaluable in understanding exoplanetary star systems. Due to their poorly constrained orbits with generally high inclinations and relative velocities, however,…
This paper proposes a decentralized trajectory planning framework for the collision avoidance problem of multiple micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) in environments with static and dynamic obstacles. The framework utilizes spatiotemporal…
This paper presents an information-based guidance and control architecture for an autonomous deputy spacecraft tasked with inspecting a chief satellite in orbit. The primary objective is for the deputy spacecraft to maximize information…
Decentralized drone swarms deployed today either rely on sharing of positions among agents or detecting swarm members with the help of visual markers. This work proposes an entirely visual approach to coordinate markerless drone swarms…
With the ever growing number of space debris in orbit, the need to prevent further space population is becoming more and more apparent. Refueling, servicing, inspection and deorbiting of spacecraft are some example missions that require…
Swarms of autonomous surface vehicles equipped with environmental sensors and decentralized communications bring a new wave of attractive possibilities for the monitoring of dynamic features in oceans and other waterbodies. However, a key…
This paper first defines a class of estimation problem called simultaneous navigation and characterization (SNAC), which is a superset of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). A SNAC framework is then developed for the Autonomous…
Demand for fast and economical parcel deliveries in urban environments has risen considerably in recent years. A framework envisions efficient last-mile delivery in urban environments by leveraging a network of ride-sharing vehicles, where…
Swarms of drones offer an increased sensing aperture, and having them mimic behaviors of natural swarms enhances sampling by adapting the aperture to local conditions. We demonstrate that such an approach makes detecting and tracking…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have a great potential to support search tasks in unstructured environments. Small, lightweight, low speed and agile UAVs, such as multi-rotors platforms can incorporate many kinds of sensors that are…
This paper introduces a testbed to study distributed sensing problems of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) exhibiting swarm intelligence. Several Smart City applications, such as transport and disaster response, require efficient collection…