Related papers: Whisker-based Tactile Flight for Tiny Drones
Aerial manipulation combines the versatility and speed of flying platforms with the functional capabilities of mobile manipulation, which presents significant challenges due to the need for precise localization and control. Traditionally,…
Sound is a rich information medium that transmits through air; people communicate through speech and can even discern material through tapping and listening. To capture frequencies in the human hearing range, commercial microphones…
Autonomous agile flight brings up fundamental challenges in robotics, such as coping with unreliable state estimation, reacting optimally to dynamically changing environments, and coupling perception and action in real time under severe…
Flying robots, such as quadrotor drones, offer new possibilities for human-robot interaction but often pose safety risks due to fast-spinning propellers, rigid structures, and noise. In contrast, lighter-than-air flapping-wing robots,…
This paper describes the hardware design and flight demonstration of a small quadrotor with imaging sensors for urban mapping, hazard avoidance, and target tracking research. The vehicle is equipped with five cameras, including two pairs of…
Fully autonomous mobile robots have a multitude of potential applications, but guaranteeing robust navigation performance remains an open research problem. For many tasks such as repeated infrastructure inspection, item delivery, or…
Thanks to their compliance and adaptability, soft robots can be deployed to perform tasks in constrained or complex environments. In these scenarios, spatial awareness of the surroundings and the ability to localize the robot within the…
Swarms of drones offer an increased sensing aperture, and having them mimic behaviors of natural swarms enhances sampling by adapting the aperture to local conditions. We demonstrate that such an approach makes detecting and tracking…
Soft robotics is an emerging field that yields promising results for tasks that require safe and robust interactions with the environment or with humans, such as grasping, manipulation, and human-robot interaction. Soft robots rely on…
Tactile sensing is a essential for skilled manipulation and object perception, but existing devices are unable to capture mechanical signals in the full gamut of regimes that are important for human touch sensing, and are unable to emulate…
Humans have exceptional tactile sensing capabilities, which they can leverage to solve challenging, partially observable tasks that cannot be solved from visual observation alone. Research in tactile sensing attempts to unlock this new…
Autonomous odor source localization remains a challenging problem for aerial robots due to turbulent airflow, sparse and delayed sensory signals, and strict payload and compute constraints. While prior unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based…
Can a robot grasp an unknown object without seeing it? In this paper, we present a tactile-sensing based approach to this challenging problem of grasping novel objects without prior knowledge of their location or physical properties. Our…
The diffusion of drones presents significant security and safety challenges. Traditional surveillance systems, particularly conventional frame-based cameras, struggle to reliably detect these targets due to their small size, high agility,…
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…
The availability of sensor-rich smart wearables and tiny, yet capable, unmanned vehicles such as nano quadcopters, opens up opportunities for a novel class of highly interactive, attention-shared human--machine teams. Reliable, lightweight,…
Estimation of tactile properties from vision, such as slipperiness or roughness, is important to effectively interact with the environment. These tactile properties help us decide which actions we should choose and how to perform them.…
Tactile sensing is essential for robots to perceive and react to the environment. However, it remains a challenge to make large-scale and flexible tactile skins on robots. Industrial machine knitting provides solutions to manufacture…
Drones are conventionally controlled using joysticks, remote controllers, mobile applications, and embedded computers. A few significant issues with these approaches are that drone control is limited by the range of electromagnetic…
Most human-robot interfaces, such as joysticks and keyboards, require training and constant cognitive effort and provide a limited degree of awareness of the robots state and its environment. Embodied interactions, instead of interfaces,…