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Quadcopters are increasingly used for applications ranging from hobby to industrial products and services. This paper serves as a tutorial on the design, simulation, implementation, and experimental outdoor testing of digital quadcopter…
Accurate and agile trajectory tracking in sub-gram Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) is challenging, as the small scale of the robot induces large model uncertainties, demanding robust feedback controllers, while the fast dynamics and…
Flying manipulators are aerial drones with attached rigid-bodied robotic arms and belong to the latest and most actively developed research areas in robotics. The rigid nature of these arms often lack compliance, flexibility, and smoothness…
The preliminary mission design of spacecraft missions to asteroids often involves, in the early phases, the selection of candidate target asteroids. The final result of such an analysis is a list of asteroids, ranked with respect to the…
Formation-flying studies to date have required continuous and minute corrections of the orbital elements and attitudes of the spacecraft.This increases the complexity, and associated risk, of controlling the formation, which often makes…
We investigate the performance of a lightweight tracking controller, based on a flow version of the Newton-Raphson method, applied to a miniature blimp and a mid-size quadrotor. This tracking technique admits theoretical performance…
Free-space optical communication is becoming a mature technology that has been demonstrated in space a number of times in the last few years. The Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has carried…
Drone racing is becoming a popular e-sport all over the world, and beating the best human drone race pilots has quickly become a new major challenge for artificial intelligence and robotics. In this paper, we propose a strategy for…
Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental vision-based task essential for enabling quadrotors to perform advanced applications. When planning the trajectory, existing approaches both on optimization and learning typically regard quadrotor as a…
The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA flight project aimed at studying the atmospheres of exoplanets -- planets orbiting stars outside our Solar System. Pandora will provide the first dataset of simultaneous, multiband (visible and NIR),…
UAVs equipped with a single depth camera encounter significant challenges in dynamic obstacle avoidance due to limited field of view and inevitable blind spots. While active vision strategies that steer onboard cameras have been proposed to…
Satellite networks are rapidly evolving, yet most \glspl{ntn} remain isolated from terrestrial orchestration frameworks. Their control architectures are typically monolithic and static, limiting their adaptability to dynamic traffic,…
The rapid advancement and miniaturization of spacecraft electronics, sensors, actuators, and power systems have resulted in growing proliferation of small-spacecraft. Coupled with this is the growing number of rocket launches, with…
Onboard autonomy technologies such as planning and scheduling, identification of scientific targets, and content-based data summarization, will lead to exciting new space science missions. However, the challenge of operating missions with…
High-Performance Adaptive Optics systems are rapidly spreading as useful applications in the fields of astronomy, ophthalmology, and telecommunications. This technology is critical to enable coronagraphic direct imaging of exoplanets…
The spacecraft attitude tracking problem is addressed with actuator faults and uncertainties among inertias, external disturbances, and, in particular, state estimates. A continuous sliding mode attitude controller is designed using…
This paper addresses the problem of multi-object tracking in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) footage. It plays a critical role in various UAV applications, including traffic monitoring systems and real-time suspect tracking by the police.…
Utilizing differential atmospheric forces in the Very Low Earth Orbits (VLEO) regime for the control of the relative motion within a satellite formation is a promising option as any thrusting device has tremendous effects on the mission…
In this article, a floating robotic emulation platform for a virtual demonstration of satellite motion in space is presented. The robotic platform design is characterized by its friction-less, levitating, yet planar motion over a…
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…