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Although quadcopters boast impressive traversal capabilities enabled by their omnidirectional maneuverability, the need for continuous pilot control in complex environments impedes their application in GNSS and telemetry-denied scenarios.…
Aerial insects can effortlessly navigate dense vegetation, whereas similarly sized aerial robots typically depend on offboard sensors and computation to maintain stable flight. This disparity restricts insect-scale robots to operation…
Flying insects are capable of vision-based navigation in cluttered environments, reliably avoiding obstacles through fast and agile maneuvers, while being very efficient in the processing of visual stimuli. Meanwhile, autonomous micro air…
This paper presents a framework for controlled emergency landing of a quadcopter, experiencing a rotor failure, away from sensitive areas. A complete mathematical model capturing the dynamics of the system is presented that takes the…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall…
Wind resistance control is an essential feature for quadcopters to maintain their position to avoid deviation from target position and prevent collisions with obstacles. Conventionally, cascaded PID controller is used for the control of…
This paper addresses the modeling and attitude control of jumping quadrupeds in low-gravity environments. First, a convex decomposition procedure is presented to generate high-accuracy and low-cost collision geometries for quadrupeds…
Interactional aerodynamics of a quadcopter in hover is numerically investigated in this study. The main objective is to understand major flow structures associated with unsteady airloads on multirotor aircraft. The overset mesh approach is…
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…
Learning to control robots without requiring engineered models has been a long-term goal, promising diverse and novel applications. Yet, reinforcement learning has only achieved limited impact on real-time robot control due to its high…
Overactuated tilt-rotor platforms offer many advantages over traditional fixed-arm drones, allowing the decoupling of the applied force from the attitude of the robot. This expands their application areas to aerial interaction and…
Deep Reinforcement learning has shown to be a powerful tool for developing policies in environments where an optimal solution is unclear. In this paper, we attempt to apply Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients to train a neural…
Biological studies show that hummingbirds can perform extreme aerobatic maneuvers during fast escape. Given a sudden looming visual stimulus at hover, a hummingbird initiates a fast backward translation coupled with a 180-degree yaw turn,…
This paper carries out the mathematical modeling, simulation, and control law design for a quadrotor with variable-pitch propellers. The use of variable-pitch propeller for thrust variation instead of RPM regulation facilitates generation…
Quadrotor stabilizing controllers often require careful, model-specific tuning for safe operation. We use reinforcement learning to train policies in simulation that transfer remarkably well to multiple different physical quadrotors. Our…
This paper explores the impact of dynamic entropy tuning in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms that train a stochastic policy. Its performance is compared against algorithms that train a deterministic one. Stochastic policies optimize a…
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear…
Controlled gliding is one of the most energetically efficient modes of transportation for natural and human powered fliers. Here we demonstrate that gliding and landing strategies with different optimality criteria can be identified through…
Autonomous flight of flapping-wing robots is a major challenge for robot perception. Most of the previous sense-and-avoid works have studied the problem of obstacle avoidance for flapping-wing robots considering only static obstacles. This…
This study explores modeling and control for quadrotor acrobatics, focusing on executing flip maneuvers. Flips are an elegant way to deliver sensor probes into no-fly or hazardous zones, like volcanic vents. Successful flips require…