Related papers: Experimental method for perching flapping-wing aer…
Aerial robots show significant potential for forest canopy research and environmental monitoring by providing data collection capabilities at high spatial and temporal resolutions. However, limited flight endurance hinders their…
We study experimentally a four-winged flapping flyer with chord-wise flexible wings in a self-propelled setup. For a given physical configuration of the flyer (i.e. fixed distance between the forewing and hindwing pairs and fixed wing…
This study demonstrates a method to locate an ideal perch location on a tree for vision-guided autonomous tree-perching drones. Various image processing algorithms, including those used for machine learning, image segmentation and binary…
We designed and built a three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) flapping wing robot, Flapperoo, to study the aerodynamic benefits of wing folding and twisting. Forces and moments of this physical model are measured in wind tunnel tests over a…
Over the past decades, quadcopters have been investigated, due to their mobility and flexibility to operate in a wide range of environments. They have been used in various areas, including surveillance and monitoring. During a mission,…
Bird-sized flapping-wing robots offer significant potential for agile flight in complex environments, but achieving agile and robust trajectory tracking remains a challenge due to the complex aerodynamics and highly nonlinear dynamics…
Flapping-wing robots offer significant versatility; however, achieving efficient multi-modal locomotion remains challenging. This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimentation of a novel tailless flapping-wing robot with three…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles are deployed for a variety tasks including surveillance and monitoring. Perching and staring allow the vehicle to monitor targets without flying, saving battery power and increasing the overall mission time…
Stability of flapping flight, a natural requirement for flying insects, is one of the major challenges for designing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). To better understand how a flying insect could stabilize itself during hover, we have…
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…
We present the first decentralized multi-copter flock that performs stable autonomous outdoor flight with up to 10 flying agents. By decentralized and autonomous we mean that all members navigate themselves based on the dynamic information…
Inverted landing is a routine behavior among a number of animal fliers. However, mastering this feat poses a considerable challenge for robotic fliers, especially to perform dynamic perching with rapid body rotations (or flips) and landing…
Spatial single-loop mechanisms such as Bennett linkages offer a unique combination of one-degree-of-freedom actuation and nontrivial spatial trajectories, making them attractive for lightweight bio-inspired robotic design. However, although…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
Flow visualisations are essential to better understand the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight. The issues inherent to animal experiments, such as poor controllability and unnatural flapping when tethered, can be avoided by using…
The endurance and energy efficiency of drones remain critical challenges in their design and operation. To extend mission duration, numerous studies explored perching mechanisms that enable drones to conserve energy by temporarily…
Perching allows unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to reduce energy consumption, remain anchored for surface sampling operations, or stably survey their surroundings. Previous efforts for perching on vertical surfaces have predominantly…
Protecting and restoring forest ecosystems has become an important conservation issue. Although various robots have been used for field data collection to protect forest ecosystems, the complex terrain and dense canopy make the data…
Inverted landing is a challenging feat to perform in aerial robots, especially without external positioning. However, it is routinely performed by biological fliers such as bees, flies, and bats. Our previous observations of landing…
Drilling, grinding, and setting anchors on vertical walls are fundamental processes in everyday construction work. Manually doing these works is error-prone, potentially dangerous, and elaborate at height. Today, heavy mobile ground robots…