Related papers: Testing Spacecraft Formation Flying with Crazyflie…
Aircraft that can launch ballistically and convert to autonomous, free flying drones have applications in many areas such as emergency response, defense, and space exploration, where they can gather critical situational data using onboard…
This paper presents a time-constrained model predictive control strategy for the 6 degree-of-freedom (6DOF) autonomous rendezvous and docking problem between a controllable "deputy" spacecraft and an uncontrollable "chief" spacecraft. The…
We introduce a benchmark for system identification based on 75k real-world samples from the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless nano-quadrotor, a sub-50g aerial vehicle widely adopted in robotics research. The platform presents a challenging testbed…
Recently, a practical and publicly accessible satellite standard called the SmallSat has amplified public involvement in orbital research. This allows for flexible and efficient deployments of impactful low-earth-orbit experiments that…
The off-the-shelf drones are simple to operate and easy to maintain aerial systems. However, due to proprietary flight software, these drones usually do not provide any open-source interface which can enable them for autonomous flight in…
Traditional unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm missions rely heavily on expensive custom-made drones with onboard perception or external positioning systems, limiting their widespread adoption in research and education. To address this…
This paper outlines a complete methodology for modeling an on-orbit servicing mission scenario and designing a feedback control system for the attitude dynamics that is guaranteed to robustly meet pointing requirements, despite model…
The safety of autonomous systems in dynamic and hazardous environments poses significant challenges. This paper presents a testing approach named SCALOFT for systematically assessing the safety of an autonomous aerial drone in a mine.…
High-speed flight vehicles, which travel much faster than the speed of sound, are crucial for national defense and space exploration. However, accurately predicting their behavior under numerous, varied flight conditions is a challenge and…
This paper develops a surrogate model refinement approach for the simulation of dynamical systems and the solution of optimization problems governed by dynamical systems in which surrogates replace expensive-to-compute state- and…
Autonomous drones have gained considerable attention for applications in real-world scenarios, such as search and rescue, inspection, and delivery. As their use becomes ever more pervasive in civilian applications, failure to ensure safe…
Intra-vehicular free-flying robots are anticipated to support various work in human spaceflight while working side-by-side with astronauts. Such example of robots includes NASA's Astrobee, DLR's CIMON, and JAXA's Int-Ball, which are…
We present fully autonomous source seeking onboard a highly constrained nano quadcopter, by contributing application-specific system and observation feature design to enable inference of a deep-RL policy onboard a nano quadcopter. Our…
The US Naval Research Laboratory's (NRL's) Autonomous Planning In-space Assembly Reinforcement-learning free-flYer (APIARY) experiment pioneers the use of reinforcement learning (RL) for control of free-flying robots in the zero-gravity…
This work adds on to the on-going efforts to provide more autonomy to space robots. Here the concept of programming by demonstration or imitation learning is used for trajectory planning of manipulators mounted on small spacecraft. For…
With the rapid advance of sophisticated control algorithms, the capabilities of drones to stabilise, fly and manoeuvre autonomously have dramatically improved, enabling us to pay greater attention to entire missions and the interaction of a…
The flight of a quadcopter drone, readily available as a toy, is analyzed using simple physics concepts. A smartphone with built-in accelerometer and gyroscope was attached to the drone to register the accelerations and angular velocities…
A computational system is called autonomous if it is able to make its own decisions, or take its own actions, without human supervision or control. The capability and spread of such systems have reached the point where they are beginning to…
Given the cost and critical functions of satellite constellations, ensuring mission longevity and safe decommissioning is essential for space sustainability. This article presents a Model Predictive Control for spacecraft trajectory and…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), in particular Drones, have gained significant importance in diverse sectors, mainly military uses. Recently, we can see a growth in acceptance of autonomous UAVs in civilian spaces as well. However, there is…