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This paper presents a non-parametric approach for segmenting trees from airborne LiDAR data in deciduous forests. Based on the LiDAR point cloud, the approach collects crown information such as steepness and height on-the-fly to delineate…
Quadrotors with the ability to perch on moving inclined surfaces can save energy and extend their travel distance by leveraging ground vehicles. Achieving dynamic perching places high demands on the performance of trajectory planning and…
Data collection for forestry, timber, and agriculture currently relies on manual techniques which are labor-intensive and time-consuming. We seek to demonstrate that robotics offers improvements over these techniques and accelerate…
We present a solution for autonomous forest inventory with a legged robotic platform. Compared to their wheeled and aerial counterparts, legged platforms offer an attractive balance of endurance and low soil impact for forest applications.…
This paper introduces a reactive navigation framework for mobile robots in 3-dimensional (3D) space. The proposed approach does not rely on the global map information and achieves fast navigation by employing a tentacle based sampling and…
Many-legged elongated robots show promise for reliable mobility on rugged landscapes. However, most studies on these systems focus on planar motion planning without addressing rapid vertical motion. Despite their success on mild rugged…
Controlling hand exoskeletons to assist individuals with grasping tasks poses a challenge due to the difficulty in understanding user intentions. We propose that most daily grasping tasks during activities of daily living (ADL) can be…
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…
An approach to control tethered wings for airborne wind energy is proposed. A fixed length of the lines is considered, and the aim of the control system is to obtain figure-eight crosswind trajectories. The proposed technique is based on…
Snake robots have been studied for decades with the aim of achieving biological snakes' fluent locomotion. Yet, as of today, their locomotion remains far from that of the biological snakes. Our recent study suggested that snake locomotion…
Drag-based swimming with rowing appendages, fins, and webbed feet is a widely adapted locomotion form in aquatic animals. To develop effective underwater and swimming vehicles, a wide range of bioinspired drag-based paddles have been…
A tethered marsupial robotics system comprises three components: an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), and a tether connecting both robots. Marsupial systems are highly beneficial in industry as they extend the…
Autonomous drone navigation faces a critical challenge in achieving accurate landings on dynamic platforms, especially under unpredictable conditions such as wind turbulence. Our research introduces TornadoDrone, a novel Deep Reinforcement…
Many manipulation tasks pose a challenge since they depend on non-visual environmental information that can only be determined after sustained physical interaction has already begun. This is particularly relevant for effort-sensitive,…
Perception and decision-making in high-speed dynamic scenarios remain challenging for current robots. In contrast, humans and animals can rapidly perceive and make decisions in such environments. Taking table tennis as a typical example,…
We introduce top trees as a design of a new simpler interface for data structures maintaining information in a fully-dynamic forest. We demonstrate how easy and versatile they are to use on a host of different applications. For example, we…
Motion planning for a multi-limbed climbing robot must consider the robot's posture, joint torques, and how it uses contact forces to interact with its environment. This paper focuses on motion planning for a robot that uses nontraditional…
Reliable robotic grasping, especially with deformable objects such as fruits, remains a challenging task due to underactuated contact interactions with a gripper, unknown object dynamics and geometries. In this study, we propose a…
This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…
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…