Related papers: Agilicious: Open-Source and Open-Hardware Agile Qu…

The problem of safety for robotic systems has been extensively studied. However, little attention has been given to security issues for three-dimensional systems, such as quadrotors. Malicious adversaries can compromise robot sensors and…

In the evolving landscape of high-speed agile quadrotor flight, achieving precise trajectory tracking at the platform's operational limits is paramount. Controllers must handle actuator constraints, exhibit robustness to disturbances, and…

Quadrotors are among the most agile flying robots. Despite recent advances in learning-based control and computer vision, autonomous drones still rely on explicit state estimation. On the other hand, human pilots only rely on a…

We address one of the main challenges towards autonomous quadrotor flight in complex environments, which is flight through narrow gaps. While previous works relied on off-board localization systems or on accurate prior knowledge of the gap…

Aerial manipulation combines the versatility and speed of flying platforms with the functional capabilities of mobile manipulation, which presents significant challenges due to the need for precise localization and control. Traditionally,…

Autonomous indoor flight for critical asset inspection presents fundamental challenges in perception, planning, control, and learning. Despite rapid progress, there is still a lack of a compact, active-sensing, open-source platform that is…

Quadrotors are agile. Unlike most other machines, they can traverse extremely complex environments at high speeds. To date, only expert human pilots have been able to fully exploit their capabilities. Autonomous operation with on-board…

We present our latest research in learning deep sensorimotor policies for agile, vision-based quadrotor flight. We show methodologies for the successful transfer of such policies from simulation to the real world. In addition, we discuss…

Learning-based controllers have achieved impressive performance in agile quadrotor flight but typically rely on massive training in simulation, necessitating accurate system identification for effective Sim2Real transfer. However, even with…

We present a multirotor architecture capable of aggressive autonomous flight and collision-free teleoperation in unstructured, GPS-denied environments. The proposed system enables aggressive and safe autonomous flight around clutter by…

Natural flyers use soft wings to seamlessly enable a wide range of flight behaviours, including agile manoeuvres, squeezing through narrow passageways, and withstanding collisions. In contrast, conventional quadrotor designs rely on rigid…

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…

Quadrotors are highly nonlinear dynamical systems that require carefully tuned controllers to be pushed to their physical limits. Recently, learning-based control policies have been proposed for quadrotors, as they would potentially allow…

High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small…

Flying robots are usually rather delicate and require protective enclosures when facing the risk of collision, while high complexity and reduced payload are recurrent problems with collision-resilient flying robots. Inspired by arthropods'…

Over the past decades, progress in deployable autonomous flight systems has slowly stagnated. This is reflected in today's production air-crafts, where pilots only enable simple physics-based systems such as autopilot for takeoff, landing,…

State-of-the-art quadrotor simulators have a rigid and highly-specialized structure: either are they really fast, physically accurate, or photo-realistic. In this work, we propose a novel quadrotor simulator: Flightmare. Flightmare is…

Little innovation has been made to low-level attitude flight control used by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), which still predominantly uses the classical PID controller. In this work we introduce Neuroflight, the first open source…

This letter introduces DiffAero, a lightweight, GPU-accelerated, and fully differentiable simulation framework designed for efficient quadrotor control policy learning. DiffAero supports both environment-level and agent-level parallelism…

Various perception-aware planning approaches have attempted to enhance the state estimation accuracy during maneuvers, while the feature matchability among frames, a crucial factor influencing estimation accuracy, has often been overlooked.…