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The rapid advancement of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft offers a promising opportunity to alleviate urban traffic congestion but is still limited by excessive power demands, especially during the takeoff phase. Thus,…
In this paper, we address the challenge of exploring unknown indoor aerial environments using autonomous aerial robots with Size Weight and Power (SWaP) constraints. The SWaP constraints induce limits on mission time requiring efficiency in…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in automated inspection, delivery, and navigation tasks that require reliable autonomy. This project develops a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to enable a single UAV to…
Autonomous navigation is an essential capability of smart mobility for mobile robots. Traditional methods must have the environment map to plan a collision-free path in workspace. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising technique…
Air transportation is undergoing a rapid evolution globally with the introduction of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and with it comes novel challenges and opportunities for transforming aviation. As AAM operations introduce increasing…
We focus on the problem of reliably training Reinforcement Learning (RL) models (agents) for stable low-level control in embedded systems and test our methods on a high-performance, custom-built quadrotor platform. A common but often…
Aerial robot solutions are becoming ubiquitous for an increasing number of tasks. Among the various types of aerial robots, blimps are very well suited to perform long-duration tasks while being energy efficient, relatively silent and safe.…
Controlled gliding is one of the most energetically efficient modes of transportation for natural and human powered fliers. Here we demonstrate that gliding and landing strategies with different optimality criteria can be identified through…
Autonomous drone racing in complex environments requires agile, high-speed flight while maintaining reliable obstacle avoidance. Differentiable-physics-based policy learning has recently demonstrated high sample efficiency and remarkable…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is gaining attention as a potential approach to design trajectories for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) used as flying access points in the context of cellular or Internet of Things (IoT)…
Contemporary autopilot systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are far more limited in their flight envelope as compared to experienced human pilots, thereby restricting the conditions UAVs can operate in and the types of missions they…
Nano-UAV teams offer great agility yet face severe navigation challenges due to constrained onboard sensing, communication, and computation. Existing approaches rely on high-resolution vision or compute-intensive planners, rendering them…
We present a map-less path planning algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for mobile robots navigating in unknown environment that only relies on 40-dimensional raw laser data and odometry information. The planner is trained…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful model-free paradigm for learning optimal policies. However, in navigation tasks with cluttered environments, DRL methods often suffer from insufficient exploration, especially…
Performing autonomous exploration is essential for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in unknown environments. Often, these missions start with building a map for the environment via pure exploration and subsequently using (i.e.…
Executing safe and precise flight maneuvers in dynamic high-speed winds is important for the ongoing commoditization of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, because the relationship between various wind conditions and its effect on…
The capability of UAVs for efficient autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance in complex and unknown environments is critical for applications in agricultural irrigation, disaster relief and logistics. In this paper, we propose the DPRL…
In this work, we present a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm for the off-road trajectory tracking problem. Off-road environments involve varying terrain types and elevations, and it is difficult to model the interaction dynamics…
Learning-based methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL), hold great promise for streamlining deployment, enhancing performance, and achieving generalization in the control of autonomous multirotor aerial vehicles. Deep RL has been…
In comparison to common quadrotors, the shape change of morphing quadrotors endows it with a more better flight performance but also results in more complex flight dynamics. Generally, it is extremely difficult or even impossible for…