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Drone racing is becoming a popular sport where human pilots have to control their drones to fly at high speed through complex environments and pass a number of gates in a pre-defined sequence. In this paper, we develop an autonomous system…
Air ducts are integral to modern buildings but are challenging to access for inspection. Small quadrotor drones offer a potential solution, as they can navigate both horizontal and vertical sections and smoothly fly over debris. However,…
Enabling high data-rate uplink cellular connectivity for drones is a challenging problem, since a flying drone has a higher likelihood of having line-of-sight propagation to base stations that terrestrial UEs normally do not have…
Airborne wind energy systems aim to generate renewable energy by means of the aerodynamic lift produced by a wing tethered to the ground and controlled to fly crosswind paths. The problem of maximizing the average power developed by the…
This paper formulates a team orienteering problem with multiple fixed-wing drones and develops a branch-and-price algorithm to solve the problem to optimality. Fixed-wing drones, unlike rotary drones, have kinematic constraints associated…
The rapid advancement of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft offers a promising opportunity to alleviate urban traffic congestion but is still limited by excessive power demands, especially during the takeoff phase. Thus,…
Aircraft performance models play a key role in airline operations, especially in planning a fuel-efficient flight. In practice, manufacturers provide guidelines which are slightly modified throughout the aircraft life cycle via the tuning…
Flying quadrotors in tight formations is a challenging problem. It is known that in the near-field airflow of a quadrotor, the aerodynamic effects induced by the propellers are complex and difficult to characterize. Although machine…
We study a cellular networking scenario, called DroneCells, where miniaturized base stations (BSs) are mounted on flying drones to serve mobile users. We propose that the drones never stop, and move continuously within the cell in a way…
The growing ubiquity of drones has raised concerns over the ability of traditional air-space monitoring technologies to accurately characterise such vehicles. Here, we present a CNN using a decision tree and ensemble structure to fully…
In recent years, drones have found increased applications in a wide array of real-world tasks. Model predictive control (MPC) has emerged as a practical method for drone flight control, owing to its robustness against modeling…
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…
This paper presents a novel autonomous drone-based smoke plume tracking system capable of navigating and tracking plumes in highly unsteady atmospheric conditions. The system integrates advanced hardware and software and a comprehensive…
Efficient real-time trajectory planning and control for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles is challenging due to their non-holonomic nature, complex dynamics, and the additional uncertainties introduced by unknown aerodynamic effects. In…
Local wind conditions strongly influence drone performance: headwinds increase flight time, crosswinds and wind shear hinder agility in cluttered spaces, while tailwinds reduce travel time. Although adaptive controllers can mitigate…
This paper reports a visible and thermal drone monitoring system that integrates deep-learning-based detection and tracking modules. The biggest challenge in adopting deep learning methods for drone detection is the paucity of training…
Recent innovations in autonomous drones have facilitated time-optimal flight in single-drone configurations, and enhanced maneuverability in multi-drone systems by applying optimal control and learning-based methods. However, few studies…
In this work, we introduce OmniDrones, an efficient and flexible platform tailored for reinforcement learning in drone control, built on Nvidia's Omniverse Isaac Sim. It employs a bottom-up design approach that allows users to easily design…
Agile flights of autonomous quadrotors in cluttered environments require constrained motion planning and control subject to translational and rotational dynamics. Traditional model-based methods typically demand complicated design and heavy…
In cluttered spaces, such as forests, drone picking up a payload via an abseil claw is an open challenge, as the cable is likely tangled and blocked by the branches and obstacles. To address such a challenge, in this work, a cooperative…