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Typical drones with multi rotors are generally less maneuverable due to unidirectional thrust, which may be unfavorable to agile flight in very narrow and confined spaces. This paper suggests a new bio-inspired drone that is empowered with…
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…
Avian-informed drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control…
The operation of drones in cluttered environments and over extended areas demands adaptive flight capabilities to meet the opposing aerodynamic requirements of agile and fast cruise flight. High agility and maneuverability are required to…
The size of a narrow gap traversable by a fixed-wing drone is limited by its wingspan. Inspired by birds, here, we enable the traversal of a gap of sub-wingspan width and height using a morphing-wing drone capable of temporarily sweeping in…
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…
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…
Quadrotors have demonstrated remarkable versatility, yet their full aerobatic potential remains largely untapped due to inherent underactuation and the complexity of aggressive maneuvers. Traditional approaches, separating trajectory…
The autonomous formation flight of fixed-wing drones is hard when the coordination requires the actuation over their speeds since they are critically bounded and aircraft are mostly designed to fly at a nominal airspeed. This paper proposes…
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…
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…
Bird-sized flapping-wing robots offer significant potential for agile flight in complex environments, but achieving agile and robust trajectory tracking remains a challenge due to the complex aerodynamics and highly nonlinear dynamics…
Morphing multirotors, such as the Foldable Drone , can increase the versatility of drones employing in-flight-adaptive-morphology. To further increase precision in their tasks, recent works have investigated stable flight in asymmetric…
Drones have shown to be useful aerial vehicles for unmanned transport missions such as food and medical supply delivery. This can be leveraged to deliver life-saving nutrition and medicine for people in emergency situations. However,…
Birds rely on active high-acceleration morphing and flapping to navigate complex airflows, but they can also maintain stable fixed-wing postures under persistent atmospheric disturbances. Here, we show that avian wings exhibit aerodynamic…
In this work, we evaluate the use of aerial drone hover constraints in a multisensor fusion of ground robot and drone data to improve the localization performance of a drone. In particular, we build upon our prior work on cooperative…
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…
In this paper, we propose an effective unified control law for accurately tracking agile trajectories for lifting-wing quadcopters with different installation angles, which have the capability of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) as well…
Flying drones can be used in a wide range of applications and services from surveillance to package delivery. To ensure robust control and safety of drone operations, cellular networks need to provide reliable wireless connectivity to drone…
Tilt-rotor aerial robots enable omnidirectional maneuvering through thrust vectoring, but introduce significant control challenges due to the strong coupling between joint and rotor dynamics. While model-based controllers can achieve high…