Related papers: Agilicious: Open-Source and Open-Hardware Agile Qu…
Rapid aerial grasping through robots can lead to many applications that utilize fast and dynamic picking and placing of objects. Rigid grippers traditionally used in aerial manipulators require high precision and specific object geometries…
Autonomous landing on mobile platforms is crucial for extending quadcopter operational flexibility, yet conventional methods are often too inefficient for highly dynamic scenarios. The core limitation lies in the prevalent…
Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…
Agile quadrotor flight relies on rapidly planning and accurately tracking time-optimal trajectories, a technology critical to their application in the wild. However, the computational burden of computing time-optimal trajectories based on…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
Scene transfer for vision-based mobile robotics applications is a highly relevant and challenging problem. The utility of a robot greatly depends on its ability to perform a task in the real world, outside of a well-controlled lab…
One of the most challenging tasks for a flying robot is to autonomously navigate between target locations quickly and reliably while avoiding obstacles in its path, and with little to no a-priori knowledge of the operating environment. This…
Visual control enables quadrotors to adaptively navigate using real-time sensory data, bridging perception with action. Yet, challenges persist, including generalization across scenarios, maintaining reliability, and ensuring real-time…
Agile flights of autonomous quadrotors in cluttered environments require constrained motion planning and control subject to translational and rotational dynamics. Traditional model-based methods typically demand complicated design and heavy…
Fault-tolerant control is crucial for safety-critical systems, such as quadrotors. State-of-art flight controllers can stabilize and control a quadrotor even when subjected to the complete loss of a rotor. However, these methods rely on…
Performing acrobatic maneuvers with quadrotors is extremely challenging. Acrobatic flight requires high thrust and extreme angular accelerations that push the platform to its physical limits. Professional drone pilots often measure their…
We present a perception constrained visual predictive control (PCVPC) algorithm for quadrotors to enable aggressive flights without using any position information. Our framework leverages nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to…
Realistic and controllable simulation is critical for advancing end-to-end autonomous driving, yet existing approaches often struggle to support novel view synthesis under large viewpoint changes or to ensure geometric consistency. We…
We present a novel framework demonstrating zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of visual control policies learned in a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) environment for quadrotors to fly through racing gates. Robust transfer from simulation to real…
This paper presents the design, development, and application of a novel space simulation environment for rapidly prototyping and testing flight software for distributed space systems. The environment combines the flexibility, determinism,…
Vision is an essential part of attitude control for many flying animals, some of which have no dedicated sense of gravity. Flying robots, on the other hand, typically depend heavily on accelerometers and gyroscopes for attitude…
We describe a software framework and a hardware platform used in tandem for the design and analysis of robot autonomy algorithms in simulation and reality. The software, which is open source, containerized, and operating system (OS)…
Quadrotors are extremely agile, so much in fact, that classic first-principle-models come to their limits. Aerodynamic effects, while insignificant at low speeds, become the dominant model defect during high speeds or agile maneuvers.…
We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous…
Autonomous aerial robots are increasingly being deployed in real-world scenarios, where transparent obstacles present significant challenges to reliable navigation and mapping. These materials pose a unique problem for traditional…