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Over 600,000 bridges in the U.S. must be inspected every two years to identify flaws, defects, or potential problems that may need follow-up maintenance. Bridge inspection has adopted unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) for improving…
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…
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) market has been significantly growing and Considering the availability of drones at low-cost prices the possibility of misusing them, for illegal purposes such as drug trafficking, spying, and terrorist…
Visual inertial odometry (VIO) is widely used for the state estimation of multicopters, but it may function poorly in environments with few visual features or in overly aggressive flights. In this work, we propose a perception-aware…
This paper presents a three dimensional collision avoidance approach for aerial vehicles inspired by coordinated behaviors in biological groups. The proposed strategy aims to enable a group of vehicles to converge to a common destination…
This article presents a solution to intercept an agile drone by another agile drone carrying a catching net. We formulate the interception as a Competitive Reinforcement Learning problem, where the interceptor and the target drone are…
Limited power and computational resources, absence of high-end sensor equipment and GPS-denied environments are challenges faced by autonomous micro areal vehicles (MAVs). We address these challenges in the context of autonomous navigation…
Automatic detection of flying drones is a key issue where its presence, especially if unauthorized, can create risky situations or compromise security. Here, we design and evaluate a multi-sensor drone detection system. In conjunction with…
This paper investigates a novel active-sensing-based obstacle avoidance paradigm for flying robots in dynamic environments. Instead of fusing multiple sensors to enlarge the field of view (FOV), we introduce an alternative approach that…
Perception contracts provide a method for evaluating safety of control systems that use machine learning for perception. A perception contract is a specification for testing the ML components, and it gives a method for proving end-to-end…
Avionics systems of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) or drone are the critical electronic components found onboard that regulate, navigate, and control UAV travel while ensuring public safety. Contemporary UAV avionics work together to…
Traffic Management in Advanced Aerial Mobility (AAM) inherits many elements of conventional Air Traffic Management (ATM), but brings new complexities and challenges of its own. One of its ways of guaranteeing separation is the use of…
Optical flow captures the motion of pixels in an image sequence over time, providing information about movement, depth, and environmental structure. Flying insects utilize this information to navigate and avoid obstacles, allowing them to…
Human safety has always been the main priority when working near an industrial robot. With the rise of Human-Robot Collaborative environments, physical barriers to avoiding collisions have been disappearing, increasing the risk of accidents…
Power lines are dangerous for low-flying aircraft, especially in low-visibility conditions. Thus, a vision-based system able to analyze the aircraft's surroundings and to provide the pilots with a "second pair of eyes" can contribute to…
As airborne vehicles are becoming more autonomous and ubiquitous, it has become vital to develop the capability to detect the objects in their surroundings. This paper attempts to address the problem of drones detection from other flying…
The recent development of novel aerial vehicles capable of physically interacting with the environment leads to new applications such as contact-based inspection. These tasks require the robotic system to exchange forces with…
Efficient traffic monitoring is playing a fundamental role in successfully tackling congestion in transportation networks. Congestion is strongly correlated with two measurable characteristics, the demand and the network density that impact…
While autonomous multi-robots can achieve safe and coordinated navigation, they often struggle to adapt to unforeseen conditions and to capture operator-driven objectives in unstructured environments. We present a Virtual Reality (VR)-based…
Drone racing is a recreational sport in which the goal is to pass through a sequence of gates in a minimum amount of time while avoiding collisions. In autonomous drone racing, one must accomplish this task by flying fully autonomously in…