Related papers: Docking Multirotors in Close Proximity using Learn…
Multirotors flying in close proximity induce aerodynamic wake effects on each other through propeller downwash. Conventional methods have fallen short of providing adequate 3D force-based models that can be incorporated into robust control…
Dense formation flight with multirotor swarms is a powerful, nature-inspired flight regime with numerous applications in the realworld. However, when multirotors fly in close vertical proximity to each other, the propeller downwash from the…
Flying multiple quadrotors in close proximity presents a significant challenge due to complex aerodynamic interactions, particularly downwash effects that are known to destabilize vehicles and degrade performance. Traditionally,…
Teams of flying robots can be used for inspection, delivery, and construction tasks, in which they might be required to fly very close to each other. In such close-proximity cases, nonlinear aerodynamic effects can cause catastrophic…
Reliable midair docking between small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is essential for modular aerial cooperation and manipulation, but it requires precise relative-pose control and repeatable platform under tight thrust and payload…
This work addresses the practical problem of distributed formation tracking control of a group of quadrotor vehicles in a relaxed sensing graph topology with a very limited sensor set, where only one leader vehicle can access the global…
Swarm aerial robots are required to maintain close proximity to successfully traverse narrow areas in cluttered environments. However, this movement is affected by the downwash effect generated from other quadrotors in the swarm. This…
The leader-follower formation control analysis for multiple quad-rotor systems is investigated in this paper. To achieve predefined formation in the three-dimensional air space ($x,y$ and $z$), a novel local tracking control law and a…
We describe a method for formation-change trajectory planning for large quadrotor teams in obstacle-rich environments. Our method decomposes the planning problem into two stages: a discrete planner operating on a graph representation of the…
In this paper, we present Neural-Swarm, a nonlinear decentralized stable controller for close-proximity flight of multirotor swarms. Close-proximity control is challenging due to the complex aerodynamic interaction effects between…
Flying quadrotors in tight formations is a challenging problem. It is known that in the near-field airflow of a quadrotor, the aerodynamic effects induced by the propellers are complex and difficult to characterize. Although machine…
Aerial manipulators, which combine robotic arms with multi-rotor drones, face strict constraints on arm weight and mechanical complexity. In this work, we study a lightweight 2-degree-of-freedom (DoF) arm mounted on a quadrotor via a…
We propose a scalable cooperative control approach which coordinates a group of rigidly connected autonomous surface vessels to track desired trajectories in a planar water environment as a single floating modular structure. Our approach…
Autonomous flying robots, such as multirotors, often rely on deep learning models that make predictions based on a camera image, e.g. for pose estimation. These models can predict surprising results if applied to input images outside the…
We present Neural-Swarm2, a learning-based method for motion planning and control that allows heterogeneous multirotors in a swarm to safely fly in close proximity. Such operation for drones is challenging due to complex aerodynamic…
This paper investigates the robust nonlinear close formation control problem. It aims to achieve precise position control at dynamic flight operation for a follower aircraft under the aerodynamic impact due to the trailing vortices…
Modular robots have been rising in popularity for a variety of applications, and autonomous midair docking is a necessary task for real world deployment of these robots. We present a state estimator based on the extended Kalman filter for…
In this work, we utilize discrete geometric mechanics to derive a 2nd-order variational integrator so as to simulate rigid body dynamics. The developed integrator is to simulate the motion of a free rigid body and a quad-rotor. We…
Neglecting complex aerodynamic effects hinders high-speed yet high-precision multirotor autonomy. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient learning-based model predictive controller that simultaneously optimizes a trajectory…
Existing FPV object tracking methods heavily rely on handcrafted modular pipelines, which incur high onboard computation and cumulative errors. While learning-based approaches have mitigated computational delays, most still generate only…