Related papers: A Deep Inverse-Mapping Model for a Flapping Roboti…
Flapping-wing insects, birds, and robots are thought to offset the high power cost of oscillatory wing motion by using elastic elements for energy storage and return. Insects possess highly resilient elastic regions in their flight anatomy…
Neglecting complex aerodynamic effects hinders high-speed yet high-precision multirotor autonomy. In this paper, we present a computationally efficient learning-based model predictive controller that simultaneously optimizes a trajectory…
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…
It is doubtful that animals have perfect inverse models of their limbs (e.g., what muscle contraction must be applied to every joint to reach a particular location in space). However, in robot control, moving an arm's end-effector to a…
Quadcopters have been studied for decades thanks to their maneuverability and capability of operating in a variety of circumstances. However, quadcopters suffer from dynamical nonlinearity, actuator saturation, as well as sensor noise that…
Aerial insects exhibit highly agile maneuvers such as sharp braking, saccades, and body flips under disturbance. In contrast, insect-scale aerial robots are limited to tracking non-aggressive trajectories with small body acceleration. This…
Flapping wing flight is a challenging dynamical problem and is also a very fascinating subject to study in the field of biomimetic robotics. A Bat, in particular, has a very articulated armwing mechanism with high degrees-of-freedom and…
Unmanned micro aerial vehicle research is an active area of development due to the vast potential applications. Prior work towards realizing flapping flight has achieved some success however they have relied heavily upon the use of rotary…
Wing flexibility governs the flying performance of flapping wing flyers. Here, we use a self-propelled flapping-wing model mounted on a ``merry go round'' to investigate the effect of wing compliance on the propulsive efficiency of the…
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,…
Unmanned aerospace vehicles usually carry sensors (i.e., electro-optical and/or infrared imaging cameras) as their primary payload. These sensors are used for image processing, target tracking, surveillance, mapping, and providing…
The large active wing deformation is a significant way to generate high aerodynamic forces required in bat flapping flight. Besides the twisting, the elementary morphing models of a bat wing are proposed, such as wing-bending in the…
Fluidic locomotion of flapping Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) can be very complex, particularly when the rules from insect flight dynamics (fast flapping dynamics and light wings) are not applicable. In these situations, widely used averaging…
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…
Realtime model learning proves challenging for complex dynamical systems, such as drones flying in variable wind conditions. Machine learning technique such as deep neural networks have high representation power but is often too slow to…
Developing control policies in simulation is often more practical and safer than directly running experiments in the real world. This applies to policies obtained from planning and optimization, and even more so to policies obtained from…
Modelling robot dynamics accurately is essential for control, motion optimisation and safe human-robot collaboration. Given the complexity of modern robotic systems, dynamics modelling remains non-trivial, mostly in the presence of…
We propose and show the efficacy of a new method to address generic inverse problems. Inverse modeling is the task whereby one seeks to determine the control parameters of a natural system that produce a given set of observed measurements.…
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 paper investigates stability analysis of flapping flight. Due to time-varying aerodynamic forces, such systems do not display fixed points of equilibrium. The problem is therefore approached via a limit cycle analysis based on Floquet…