Related papers: Testing Spacecraft Formation Flying with Crazyflie…
A close partnership between people and partially autonomous machines has enabled decades of space exploration. But to further expand our horizons, our systems must become more capable. Increasing the nature and degree of autonomy - allowing…
Orbit determination of spacecraft in orbit has been mostly dependent on either GNSS satellite signals or ground station telemetry. Both methods present their limitations, however: GNSS signals can only be used effectively in earth orbit,…
Visual inspection of confined spaces such as aircraft wings is ergonomically challenging for human mechanics. This work presents a novel crane robot that can travel the entire span of the aircraft wing, enabling mechanics to perform…
Nano-quadcopters are versatile platforms attracting the interest of both academia and industry. Their tiny form factor, i.e., $\,$10 cm diameter, makes them particularly useful in narrow scenarios and harmless in human proximity. However,…
Recent advancements in drone technology have shown that commercial off-the-shelf Micro Aerial Drones are more effective than large-sized drones for performing flight missions in narrow environments, such as swarming, indoor navigation, and…
We present a demonstration of service-based trajectory planning for a drone delivery system in a multi-drone skyway network. We conduct several experiments using Crazyflie drones to collect the drone's position data, wind speed and…
Robotic simulators play a crucial role in the development and testing of autonomous systems, particularly in the realm of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV). However, existing simulators often lack high-level autonomy, hindering their immediate…
Space robotics applications, such as Active Space Debris Removal (ASDR), require representative testing before launch. A commonly used approach to emulate the microgravity environment in space is air-bearing based platforms on flat-floors,…
On-orbit close proximity operations involve robotic spacecraft maneuvering and making decisions for a growing number of mission scenarios demanding autonomy, including on-orbit assembly, repair, and astronaut assistance. Of these scenarios,…
Small satellites and autonomous vehicles have greatly evolved in the last few decades. Hundreds of small satellites have been launched with increasing functionalities, in the last few years. Likewise, numerous autonomous vehicles have been…
Unmanned aerial vehicles, and multi-rotors in particular, can now perform dexterous tasks in impervious environments, from infrastructure monitoring to emergency deliveries. Autonomous drone racing has emerged as an ideal benchmark to…
Drone technology is proliferating in many industries, including agriculture, logistics, defense, infrastructure, and environmental monitoring. Vision-based autonomy is one of its key enablers, particularly for real-world applications. This…
Drones are becoming more and more popular nowadays. They are small in size, low in cost, and reliable in operation. They contain a variety of sensors and can perform a variety of flight tasks, reaching places that are difficult or…
In this work, we present an experimental setup and guide to enable the perching of large flapping-wing robots. The combination of forward flight, limited payload, and flight oscillations imposes challenging conditions for localized…
An ever increasing number of applications can employ aerial unmanned vehicles, or so-called drones, to perform different sensing and possibly also actuation tasks from the air. In some cases, the data that is captured at a given point has…
This paper presents a multi-step procedure to construct the dynamic motion model of an autonomous quadcopter, identify the model parameters, and design a model-based nonlinear trajectory tracking controller. The aim of the proposed method…
This paper presents a novel methodology to control spacecraft swarms about singleasteroids with arbitrary gravitational potential coefficients. This approach enablesthe use of small, autonomous swarm spacecraft in conjunction with a…
Aerial manipulation combines the versatility and speed of flying platforms with the functional capabilities of mobile manipulation, which presents significant challenges due to the need for precise localization and control. Traditionally,…
It is often necessary for drones to complete delivery, photography, and rescue in the shortest time to increase efficiency. Many autonomous drone races provide platforms to pursue algorithms to finish races as quickly as possible for the…
The growing ambition for space exploration demands robust autonomous systems that can operate in unstructured environments under extreme extraterrestrial conditions. The adoption of robot learning in this domain is severely hindered by the…