Related papers: Shaping and Being Shaped by Drones: Supporting Per…

Autonomous drone racing competitions are a proxy to improve unmanned aerial vehicles' perception, planning, and control skills. The recent emergence of autonomous nano-sized drone racing imposes new challenges, as their ~10cm form factor…

The drone industry is diversifying and the number of pilots increases rapidly. In this context, flight schools need adapted tools to train pilots, most importantly with regard to their own awareness of their physiological and cognitive…

Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents "dynamic…

Most human-robot interfaces, such as joysticks and keyboards, require training and constant cognitive effort and provide a limited degree of awareness of the robots state and its environment. Embodied interactions, instead of interfaces,…

In this paper we address the problem of visual reaction: the task of interacting with dynamic environments where the changes in the environment are not necessarily caused by the agent itself. Visual reaction entails predicting the future…

Drones have become essential in various applications, but conventional quadrotors face limitations in confined spaces and complex tasks. Deformable drones, which can adapt their shape in real-time, offer a promising solution to overcome…

Sub-\SI{50}{\gram} nano-drones are gaining momentum in both academia and industry. Their most compelling applications rely on onboard deep learning models for perception despite severe hardware constraints (\ie sub-\SI{100}{\milli\watt}…

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…

The availability of sensor-rich smart wearables and tiny, yet capable, unmanned vehicles such as nano quadcopters, opens up opportunities for a novel class of highly interactive, attention-shared human--machine teams. Reliable, lightweight,…

Adaptive teaming-the capability of agents to effectively collaborate with unfamiliar teammates without prior coordination-is widely explored in virtual video games but overlooked in real-world multi-robot contexts. Yet, such adaptive…

Capturing and reconstructing a human actor's motion is important for filmmaking and gaming. Currently, motion capture systems with static cameras are used for pixel-level high-fidelity reconstructions. Such setups are costly, require…

Dynamically changing environments, unreliable state estimation, and operation under severe resource constraints are fundamental challenges that limit the deployment of small autonomous drones. We address these challenges in the context of…

Aerial filming is constantly gaining importance due to the recent advances in drone technology. It invites many intriguing, unsolved problems at the intersection of aesthetical and scientific challenges. In this work, we propose a deep…

Autonomous drone racing has risen as a challenging robotic benchmark for testing the limits of learning, perception, planning, and control. Expert human pilots are able to fly a drone through a race track by mapping pixels from a single…

Deep learning often requires the manual collection and annotation of a training set. On robotic platforms, can we partially automate this task by training the robot to be curious, i.e., to seek out beneficial training information in the…

Humans race drones faster than algorithms, despite being limited to a fixed camera angle, body rate control, and response latencies in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. A better understanding of the ability of human pilots of selecting…

The task of flying in tight formations is challenging for teams of quadrotors because the complex aerodynamic wake interactions can destabilize individual team members as well as the team. Furthermore, these aerodynamic effects are highly…

This study seeks to automate camera movement control for filming existing subjects into attractive videos, contrasting with the creation of non-existent content by directly generating the pixels. We select drone videos as our test case due…

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…

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…