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Flying manipulators are aerial drones with attached rigid-bodied robotic arms and belong to the latest and most actively developed research areas in robotics. The rigid nature of these arms often lack compliance, flexibility, and smoothness…
This paper aims to develop a Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) architecture, for the case of a damaged actuator for a multirotor UAV that can be applied across multirotor platforms based on their Attainable Virtual Control Set (AVCS). The…
A major challenge in autonomous flights is unknown disturbances, which can jeopardize safety and lead to collisions, especially in obstacle-rich environments. This paper presents a disturbance-aware motion planning and control framework…
This paper proposes a novel quaternion-based approach for tracking the translation (position and linear velocity) and rotation (attitude and angular velocity) trajectories of underactuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Quadrotor UAVs are…
Utilizing a servo to tilt each rotor transforms quadrotors from underactuated to overactuated systems, allowing for independent control of both attitude and position, which provides advantages for aerial manipulation. However, this…
Flying insects can perform rapid, sophisticated maneuvers like backflips, sharp banked turns, and in-flight collision recovery. To emulate these in aerial robots weighing less than a gram, known as flying insect robots (FIRs), a fast and…
This work briefly covers our efforts to stabilize the flight dynamics of Northeastern's tailless bat-inspired micro aerial vehicle, Aerobat. Flapping robots are not new. A plethora of examples is mainly dominated by insect-style design…
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…
Flapping-wing robots offer significant versatility; however, achieving efficient multi-modal locomotion remains challenging. This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimentation of a novel tailless flapping-wing robot with three…
Recent quadrotors have transcended conventional designs, emphasizing more on foldable and reconfigurable bodies. The state of the art still focuses on the mechanical feasibility of such designs with limited discussions on the tracking…
Unmanned aerial vehicles are rapidly evolving within the field of robotics. However, their performance is often limited by payload capacity, operational time, and robustness to impact and collision. These limitations of aerial vehicles…
We present SMORS, the first Soft fully actuated MultirOtoR System for multimodal locomotion. Unlike conventional hexarotors, SMORS is equipped with three rigid and three continuously soft arms, with each arm hosting a propeller. We create a…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
This paper develops and compares two motion planning algorithms for a tethered UAV with and without the possibility of the tether contacting the confined and cluttered environment. Tethered aerial vehicles have been studied due to their…
Two-dimensional multilinked structures can benefit aerial robots in both maneuvering and manipulation because of their deformation ability. However, certain types of singular forms must be avoided during deformation. Hence, an additional 1…
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…
Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult…
Propeller failure is a major cause of multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) crashes. While conventional multirotor systems struggle to address this issue due to underactuation, over-actuated platforms can continue flying with…
In this letter, we present a novel bi-modal bi-copter robot called Skater, which is adaptable to air and various ground surfaces. Skater consists of a bi-copter moving along its longitudinal direction with two passive wheels on both sides.…
In this paper, a new under-actuated Bi-Quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is introduced. The proposed drone configuration can be controlled similar to a Bicopter. The dynamics of the proposed Bi-Quadcopter is developed using the…