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Autonomous drone racing requires powerful perception, planning, and control and has become a benchmark and test field for autonomous, agile flight. Existing work usually assumes static race tracks with known maps, which enables offline…
This paper introduces a learning-based visual planner for agile drone flight in cluttered environments. The proposed planner generates collision-free waypoints in milliseconds, enabling drones to perform agile maneuvers in complex…
This work presents an actuation framework for a bioinspired flapping drone called Aerobat. This drone, capable of producing dynamically versatile wing conformations, possesses 14 body joints and is tail-less. Therefore, in our robot, unlike…
Bats' dynamic morphing wings are known to be extremely high-dimensional, and they employ the combination of inertial dynamics and aerodynamics manipulations to showcase extremely agile maneuvers. Bats heavily rely on their highly flexible…
While Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in several missions, their inability of reliable and consistent autonomous landing poses a major setback for deploying such systems truly autonomously. In this paper we present…
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…
Drones are becoming versatile in a myriad of applications. This has led to the use of drones for spying and intruding into the restricted or private air spaces. Such foul use of drone technology is dangerous for the safety and security of…
This paper proposes a novel control law for accurate tracking of agile trajectories using a tailsitter flying wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that transitions between vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and forward flight. The global…
Drone swarms are required for the simultaneous delivery of multiple packages. We demonstrate a multi-stop drone swarm-based delivery in a smart city. We leverage formation flying to conserve energy and increase the flight range of a drone…
This paper presents a multi-step procedure to construct the dynamic motion model of an autonomous quadcopter, identify the model parameters, and design a model-based nonlinear trajectory tracking controller. The aim of the proposed method…
How to endow aerial robots with the ability to operate in close proximity remains an open problem. The core challenges lie in the propulsion system's dual-task requirement: generating manipulation forces while simultaneously counteracting…
Unmanned aerial vehicles, and multi-rotors in particular, can now perform dexterous tasks in impervious environments, from infrastructure monitoring to emergency deliveries. Autonomous drone racing has emerged as an ideal benchmark to…
Successful aerial manipulation largely depends on how effectively a controller can tackle the coupling dynamic forces between the aerial vehicle and the manipulator. However, this control problem has remained largely unsolved as the…
The Roller-Quadrotor is a novel quadrotor that combines the maneuverability of aerial drones with the endurance of ground vehicles. This work focuses on the design, modeling, and experimental validation of the Roller-Quadrotor. Flight…
Swarms of drones are being more and more used in many practical scenarios, such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, search and rescue in hardly-accessible areas, etc.. While a single drone can be guided by a human operator, the…
Insects control unsteady aerodynamic forces on flapping wings to navigate complex environments. While understanding these forces is vital for biology, physics, and engineering, existing evaluation methods face trade-offs: high-fidelity…
This paper studies the feasibility of supporting drone operations using existent cellular infrastructure. We propose an analytical framework that includes the effects of base station (BS) height and antenna radiation pattern, drone antenna…
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…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are finding use in applications that place increasing emphasis on robustness to external disturbances including extreme wind. However, traditional multirotor UAV platforms do not directly sense wind;…
As drones are getting more and more entangled in our society, more untrained users require the capability to operate them. This scenario is to be achieved through the development of artificial intelligence capabilities assisting the human…