Related papers: Experimental method for perching flapping-wing aer…
Promoting exploratory movements through contingent feedback can positively influence motor development in infancy. Our ongoing work gears toward the development of a robot-assisted contingency learning environment through the use of small…
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying and rolling can overcome many roughness limitations and…
Many industrial tasks-such as sanding, installing fasteners, and wire harnessing-are difficult to automate due to task complexity and variability. We instead investigate deploying robots in an assistive role for these tasks, where the robot…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
Manipulation performance improvement is crucial for aerial robots. For aerial manipulators, the baselink position and attitude errors directly affect the precision at the end effector. To address this stability problem, fixed-body…
In this paper, we consider the problem of multirotor flying robots physically interacting with the environment under wind influence. The result are the first algorithms for simultaneous online estimation of contact and aerodynamic wrenches…
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…
This paper formulates a team orienteering problem with multiple fixed-wing drones and develops a branch-and-price algorithm to solve the problem to optimality. Fixed-wing drones, unlike rotary drones, have kinematic constraints associated…
Extrinsic manipulation, a technique that enables robots to leverage extrinsic resources for object manipulation, presents practical yet challenging scenarios. Particularly in the context of extrinsic manipulation on a supporting plane,…
As the space domain becomes increasingly congested, autonomy is proposed as one approach to enable small numbers of human ground operators to manage large constellations of satellites and tackle more complex missions such as on-orbit or…
Autonomous landing on sloped terrain poses significant challenges for small, lightweight spacecraft, such as rotorcraft and landers. These vehicles have limited processing capability and payload capacity, which makes advanced deep learning…
Shared autonomy methods, where a human operator and a robot arm work together, have enabled robots to complete a range of complex and highly variable tasks. Existing work primarily focuses on one human sharing autonomy with a single robot.…
For mobile robots to be effectively applied to real world unstructured environments -- such as large scale farming -- they require the ability to generate adaptive plans that account both for limited onboard resources, and the presence of…
An asymmetric two-link robot supported atop a flat platform by wheels that roll and pivot freely, but do not slip laterally, will develop forward momentum if the joint between the links is actuated internally. In particular, oscillations in…
Brachiation is a dynamic, coordinated swinging maneuver of body and arms used by monkeys and apes to move between branches. As a unique underactuated mode of locomotion, it is interesting to study from a robotics perspective since it can…
Birds, bats and many insects can tuck their wings against their bodies at rest and deploy them to power flight. Whereas birds and bats use well-developed pectoral and wing muscles and tendons, how insects control these movements remains…
This paper presents the first demonstration of autonomous roofing with a multicopter. A DJI S1000 octocopter equipped with an off-the-shelf nailgun and an adjustableslope roof mock-up were used. The nailgun was modified to allow triggering…
Ocean sampling for highly temporal phenomena, such as harmful algal blooms, necessitates a vehicle capable of fast aerial travel interspersed with an aquatic means of acquiring in-situ measurements. Vehicle platforms with this capability…
This MS thesis outlines my contributions to the closed loop control and system integration of two robotic platforms: 1) Aerobat, a flapping wing robot stabilized by air jets, and 2) Harpy, a bipedal robot equipped with dual thrusters. Both…
In recent years, high-speed navigation and environment interaction in the context of aerial robotics has become a field of interest for several academic and industrial research studies. In particular, Search and Intercept (SaI) applications…