Related papers: Flexbee: A Grasping and Perching UAV Based on Soft…
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…
Testing the aerodynamics of micro- and nano-UAVs without actually flying is highly challenging. To address this issue, we introduce Open Gimbal, a specially designed 3 Degrees of Freedom platform that caters to the unique requirements of…
The paper discusses a novel vision-based estimation and control approach to enable fully autonomous tracking and landing of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on moving platforms without relying on…
This paper introduces a novel, small form-factor, aerial vehicle research platform for agile object detection, classification, tracking, and interaction tasks. General-purpose hardware components were designed to augment a given aerial…
Aerial surveillance and monitoring demand both real-time and robust motion detection from a moving camera. Most existing techniques for drones involve sending a video data streams back to a ground station with a high-end desktop computer or…
Minimum Snap Trajectory Generation and Control for an Under-actuated Flapping Wing Aerial VehicleThis paper presents both the trajectory generation and tracking control strategies for an underactuated flapping wing aerial vehicle (FWAV).…
Aerial robotic arms aim to enable inspection and environment interaction in otherwise hard-to-reach areas from the air. However, many aerial manipulators feature bulky or heavy robot manipulators mounted to large, high-payload aerial…
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…
This work introduces a novel analytical model for estimating the airspeed of fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) using solely propeller power and rotational speed measurements. The model can be used to replace Pitot-tube-based…
This study addresses a flexible holding tool for robotic disassembly. We propose a shell-type soft jig that securely and universally holds objects, mitigating the risk of component damage and adapting to diverse shapes while enabling soft…
The natural wind environment that volant insects encounter is unsteady and highly complex, posing significant flight control and stability challenges. Unsteady airflows can range from structured chains of discrete vortices shed in the wake…
The disassembly of small household appliances poses significant challenges due to their complex and curved geometries, which render traditional rigid fixtures inadequate. In this paper, we propose a modular vacuum-based fixturing system…
Robust cooperative formation control is investigated in this paper for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles in close formation flight to save energy. A novel cooperative control method is developed. The concept of virtual structure is…
UAVs are becoming versatile and valuable platforms for various applications. However, the main limitation is their flying time. We present BEAVIS, a novel aerial robotic platform striking an unparalleled trade-off between the…
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…
In this work, we optimize the 3D trajectory of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based portable access point (PAP) that provides wireless services to a set of ground nodes (GNs). Moreover, as per the Peukert effect, we consider pragmatic…
Electroadhesion (EA) provides electrically switchable adhesion and is a promising mechanism for perching micro aerial robots on smooth surfaces. However, practical implementations of soft and stretchable EA pads for aerial perching remain…
Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer endurance and efficiency but lack low-speed agility due to highly coupled dynamics. We present an end-to-end sensing-to-control pipeline that combines bio-inspired hardware, physics-informed…
Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer significant performance advantages over rotary-wing UAVs in terms of speed, endurance, and efficiency. However, these vehicles have traditionally been severely limited with regards to…
This paper discusses the conceptual design and proof-of-concept flight demonstration of a novel variable pitch quadrotor biplane Unmanned Aerial Vehicle concept for payload delivery. The proposed design combines vertical takeoff and landing…