Related papers: Repeatable Energy-Efficient Perching for Flapping-…
Aerial robotic arms aim to enable inspection and environment interaction in otherwise hard-to-reach areas from the air. However, many aerial manipulators feature bulky or heavy robot manipulators mounted to large, high-payload aerial…
Removing floating litter from water bodies is crucial to preserving aquatic ecosystems and preventing environmental pollution. In this work, we present a multi-robot aerial soft manipulator for floating litter collection, leveraging the…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
Motivated by a winged seed, which takes advantage of a wing with high angles of attack and its associated leading-edge vortex to boost lift, we propose a powered 13.8-gram aerial robot with the maximum take-off weight of 310 mN (31.6 gram)…
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…
Here we present the design of an insect-scale microrobot that generates lift by spinning its wings. This is in contrast to most other microrobot designs at this size scale which rely on flapping wings to produce lift. The robot has a wing…
Collective patterns of motion emerge across biological taxa: insects swarm, fish school, and birds flock. In particular, large migratory birds form strikingly ordered V-shaped formations, which experiments and direct numerical simulations…
As platform size is reduced, the flight of aerial robots becomes increasingly energetically expensive. Limitations on payload and endurance of these small robots have prompted researchers to explore the use of bimodal aerial-surface…
Aerial manipulation requires force-aware capabilities to enable safe and effective grasping and physical interaction. Previous works often rely on heavy, expensive force sensors unsuitable for typical quadrotor platforms, or perform…
The ability to move and hover has made rotary-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) suitable platforms to act as Flying Communications Relays (FCR), aiming at providing on-demand, temporary wireless connectivity when there is no network…
Existing research has yet to reach a consensus on whether and how small flying animals utilize elastic energy storage mechanisms to reduce flight energy expenditure, and there is a lack of systematic and universal methods for assessment. To…
The concept of aerial-aquatic robots has emerged as an innovative solution that can operate both in the air and underwater. Previous research on the design of such robots has been mainly focused on mature technologies such as fixed-wing and…
A hover-capable insect-inspired flying robot that can remain long in the air has shown its potential use for both confined indoor and outdoor applications to complete assigned tasks. In this letter, we report improvements in the flight…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
This paper presents, for the first time, the soft planar vertical take-off and landing (Soft-PVTOL) aircraft. This concept captures the soft aerial vehicle's fundamental dynamics with a minimum number of states and inputs but retains the…
We introduce FalconWing, an ultra-light (150 g) indoor fixed-wing UAV platform for vision-based autonomy. Controlled indoor environment enables year-round repeatable UAV experiment but imposes strict weight and maneuverability limits on the…
Perception systems for ornithopters face severe challenges. The harsh vibrations and abrupt movements caused during flapping are prone to produce motion blur and strong lighting condition changes. Their strict restrictions in weight, size,…
In this paper, we present the design, simulation and experimental validation of a control architecture for a flying hand, i.e., a system made of an unmanned aerial vehicle, a robotic manipulator and a gripper, which is grasping an object…
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…
Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of…