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Space exploration missions have seen use of increasingly sophisticated robotic systems with ever more autonomy. Deep learning promises to take this even a step further, and has applications for high-level tasks, like path planning, as well…

Imitation learning is a well-established approach for machine-learning-based control. However, its applicability depends on having access to demonstrations, which are often expensive to collect and/or suboptimal for solving the task. In…

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…

Spacecraft relative motion planning is concerned with the design and execution of maneuvers relative to a nominal target. These types of maneuvers are frequently utilized in missions such as rendezvous and docking, satellite inspection and…

This survey article deals with applications of optimal control to aerospace problems with a focus on modern geometric optimal control tools and numerical continuation techniques. Geometric optimal control is a theory combining optimal…

The recent increase in yearly spacecraft launches and the high number of planned launches have raised questions about maintaining accessibility to space for all interested parties. A key to sustaining the future of space-flight is the…

Drone base stations (DBSs) have recently gained wide popularity as a possible solution to provide wireless connectivity in a variety of scenarios, for example, in inaccessible terrains such as connectivity over vast areas of a water body or…

Automating the navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in diverse scenarios has gained much attention in recent years. However, teaching UAVs to fly in challenging environments remains an unsolved problem, mainly due to the lack of…

This paper presents a Neural Networks (NNs) based approach for designing the Fuel-Optimal Powered Descent Guidance (FOPDG) for lunar pinpoint landing. According to Pontryagin's Minimum Principle, the optimality conditions are first derived.…

Navigation is one of the most heavily studied problems in robotics, and is conventionally approached as a geometric mapping and planning problem. However, real-world navigation presents a complex set of physical challenges that defies…

Efficient motion planning algorithms are of central importance for deploying robots in the real world. Unfortunately, these algorithms often drastically reduce the dimensionality of the problem for the sake of feasibility, thereby foregoing…

Deep Learning, driven by neural networks, has led to groundbreaking advancements in Artificial Intelligence by enabling systems to learn and adapt like the human brain. These models have achieved remarkable results, particularly in…

To extend the limited scope of autonomy used in prior missions for operation in distant and complex environments, there is a need to further develop and mature autonomy that jointly reasons over multiple subsystems, which we term…

Autonomous agile flight brings up fundamental challenges in robotics, such as coping with unreliable state estimation, reacting optimally to dynamically changing environments, and coupling perception and action in real time under severe…

In this work, we propose a data-driven approach to optimize the parameters of a simulation such that control policies can be directly transferred from simulation to a real-world quadrotor. Our neural network-based policies take only onboard…

Neural operator methods have emerged as powerful tools for learning mappings between infinite-dimensional function spaces, yet their potential in optimal control remains largely unexplored. We focus on multi-task control problems, whose…

The real-world application of small drones is mostly hampered by energy limitations. Neuromorphic computing promises extremely energy-efficient AI for autonomous flight but is still challenging to train and deploy on real robots. To reap…

Performance of model-based feedforward controllers is typically limited by the accuracy of the inverse system dynamics model. Physics-guided neural networks (PGNN), where a known physical model cooperates in parallel with a neural network,…

With the fast and unstoppable evolution of robotics and artificial intelligence, effective autonomous navigation in real-world scenarios has become one of the most pressing challenges in the literature. However, demanding requirements, such…

Unmanned systems (USs) including unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and unmanned ground vehicles have great application prospects in military and civil fields, among which the process of finding feasible and optimal…