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Fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are one of the most commonly used platforms for the burgeoning Low-altitude Economy (LAE) and Urban Air Mobility (UAM), due to their long endurance and high-speed capabilities. Classical obstacle…
Autopilot systems are typically composed of an "inner loop" providing stability and control, while an "outer loop" is responsible for mission-level objectives, e.g. way-point navigation. Autopilot systems for UAVs are predominately…
Safe flight in dynamic environments requires unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to make effective decisions when navigating cluttered spaces with moving obstacles. Traditional approaches often decompose decision-making into hierarchical…
The capability to autonomously track a non-cooperative target is a key technological requirement for micro aerial vehicles. In this paper, we propose an output feedback control scheme based on deep reinforcement learning for controlling a…
Autonomous drone racing has risen as a challenging robotic benchmark for testing the limits of learning, perception, planning, and control. Expert human pilots are able to fly a drone through a race track by mapping pixels from a single…
Designing effective low-level robot controllers often entail platform-specific implementations that require manual heuristic parameter tuning, significant system knowledge, or long design times. With the rising number of robotic and…
Drones equipped with overhead manipulators offer unique capabilities for inspection, maintenance, and contact-based interaction. However, the motion of the drone and its manipulator is tightly linked, and even small attitude changes caused…
Learning-based methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning (RL), hold great promise for streamlining deployment, enhancing performance, and achieving generalization in the control of autonomous multirotor aerial vehicles. Deep RL has been…
This paper investigates the application of Deep Reinforcement (DRL) Learning to address motion control challenges in drones for additive manufacturing (AM). Drone-based additive manufacturing promises flexible and autonomous material…
Imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) each offer distinct advantages for robotics policy learning: IL provides stable learning from demonstrations, and RL promotes generalization through exploration. While existing robot…
This paper demonstrates that continual relearning of control policies using incremental deep reinforcement learning (RL) can improve policy learning for non-stationary processes. We demonstrate this approach for a data-driven 'smart…
In this paper, we introduce advances in the sensor suite of an autonomous flying insect robot (FIR) weighing less than a gram. FIRs, because of their small weight and size, offer unparalleled advantages in terms of material cost and…
Unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) rely on effective path planning and tracking control to accomplish complex tasks in various domains. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are becoming increasingly popular in control applications, as they…
The Autonomy of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in indoor environments poses significant challenges due to the lack of reliable GPS signals in enclosed spaces such as warehouses, factories, and indoor facilities. Micro Aerial Vehicles…
This work improves the positioning precision of lightweight robots with series elastic actuators (SEAs). Lightweight SEA robots, along with low-impedance control, can maneuver without causing damage in uncertain, confined spaces such as…
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,…
Two current methods used to train autonomous cars are reinforcement learning and imitation learning. This research develops a new learning methodology and systematic approach in both a simulated and a smaller real world environment by…
Most reinforcement-learning (RL) controllers used in continuous control are architecturally centralized: observations are compressed into a single latent state from which both value estimates and actions are produced. Biological control…
In the field of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) landing, conventional approaches fall short in delivering not only the required precision but also the resilience against environmental disturbances. Yet, learning-based algorithms…
We introduce Air Learning, an open-source simulator, and a gym environment for deep reinforcement learning research on resource-constrained aerial robots. Equipped with domain randomization, Air Learning exposes a UAV agent to a diverse set…