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Historically, the rotorcraft community has experienced a higher fatal accident rate than other aviation segments, including commercial and general aviation. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and the application of these…
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…
We address one of the main challenges towards autonomous quadrotor flight in complex environments, which is flight through narrow gaps. While previous works relied on off-board localization systems or on accurate prior knowledge of the gap…
This paper presents a method to recover quadrotor UAV from a throw, when no control parameters are known before the throw. We leverage the availability of high-frequency rotor speed feedback available in racing drone hardware and software…
We present a novel vision-based control method to make a group of ground mobile robots achieve a specified formation shape with unspecified size. Our approach uses multiple aerial control units equipped with downward-facing cameras, each…
This paper tackles the problem of estimating the relative position, orientation, and velocity between a UAV and a planar platform undergoing arbitrary 3D motion during approach and landing. The estimation relies on measurements from…
Drones have gained popularity in a wide range of field ranging from aerial photography, aerial mapping, and investigation of electric power lines. Every drone that we know today is carrying out some kind of control algorithm at the low…
Small flying robots can perform landing maneuvers using bio-inspired optical flow by maintaining a constant divergence. However, optical flow is typically estimated from frame sequences recorded by standard miniature cameras. This requires…
This paper addresses the problem of estimating air velocity and full attitude for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in GNSS-denied environments using minimal onboard sensing-an interesting and practically relevant challenge for UAV…
Overactuated tilt-rotor platforms offer many advantages over traditional fixed-arm drones, allowing the decoupling of the applied force from the attitude of the robot. This expands their application areas to aerial interaction and…
We discuss the problem of designing and implementing controllers for insect-scale flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), from a unifying perspective and employing two different experimental platforms; namely, a Harvard RoboBee-like…
Decentralized deployment of drone swarms usually relies on inter-agent communication or visual markers that are mounted on the vehicles to simplify their mutual detection. This letter proposes a vision-based detection and tracking algorithm…
Air-bearing platforms for simulating the rotational dynamics of satellites require highly precise ground truth systems. Unfortunately, commercial motion capture systems used for this scope are complex and expensive. This paper shows a novel…
This paper presents a new framework to use images as the inputs for the controller to have autonomous flight, considering the noisy indoor environment and uncertainties. A new Proportional-Integral-Derivative-Accelerated (PIDA) control with…
Autonomous drone racing has attracted increasing interest as a research topic for exploring the limits of agile flight. However, existing studies primarily focus on obstacle-free racetracks, while the perception and dynamic challenges…
On-orbit manual attitude control of manned spacecraft is accomplished using external visual references and some method of three axis attitude control. All past, present, and developmental spacecraft feature the capability to manually…
Although quadcopters boast impressive traversal capabilities enabled by their omnidirectional maneuverability, the need for continuous pilot control in complex environments impedes their application in GNSS and telemetry-denied scenarios.…
The cooperation of a human pilot with an autonomous agent during flight control realizes parallel autonomy. We propose an air-guardian system that facilitates cooperation between a pilot with eye tracking and a parallel end-to-end neural…
We present our latest research in learning deep sensorimotor policies for agile, vision-based quadrotor flight. We show methodologies for the successful transfer of such policies from simulation to the real world. In addition, we discuss…
As robots aspire for long-term autonomous operations in complex dynamic environments, the ability to reliably take mission-critical decisions in ambiguous situations becomes critical. This motivates the need to build systems that have…