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When pushing the speed limit for aggressive off-road navigation on uneven terrain, it is inevitable that vehicles may become airborne from time to time. During time-sensitive tasks, being able to fly over challenging terrain can also save…
Soft landing on small celestial bodies (SCBs) poses unique challenges, as gravitational models poorly characterize the higher-order gravitational effects of SCBs. Existing control approaches lack guarantees for safety under gravitational…
This paper presents an optic flow-guided approach for achieving soft landings by resource-constrained unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on dynamic platforms. An offline data-driven linear model based on Koopman operator theory is developed to…
This paper investigates the infinite horizon optimal control problem (OCP) for space applications characterized by nonlinear dynamics. The proposed approach divides the problem into a finite horizon OCP with a regularized terminal cost,…
In the field of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) landing, conventional approaches fall short in delivering not only the required precision but also the resilience against environmental disturbances. Yet, learning-based algorithms…
This paper presents a novel approach for optical flow control of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). The task is challenging due to the nonlinearity of optical flow observables. Our proposed Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) control…
Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult…
Precise landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) onto moving platforms like Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) is both important and challenging, especially in GPS-denied environments, for collaborative navigation of heterogeneous…
This paper investigates the robust nonlinear close formation control problem. It aims to achieve precise position control at dynamic flight operation for a follower aircraft under the aerodynamic impact due to the trailing vortices…
In this letter, we present a distributed algorithm for flocking in complex environments that operates at constant altitude, without explicit communication, no a priori information about the environment, and by using only on-board sensing…
Estimating the direction of ambient fluid flow is key for many flying or swimming animals and robots, but can only be accomplished through indirect measurements and active control. Recent work with tethered flying insects indicates that…
Locomotion on dynamic rigid surface (i.e., rigid surface accelerating in an inertial frame) presents complex challenges for controller design, which are essential for deploying humanoid robots in dynamic real-world environments such as…
The autonomous formation flight of fixed-wing drones is hard when the coordination requires the actuation over their speeds since they are critically bounded and aircraft are mostly designed to fly at a nominal airspeed. This paper proposes…
This paper addresses an optimal guidance problem concerning the vertical landing of a lunar lander with the objective of minimizing fuel consumption. The vertical landing imposes a final attitude constraint, which is treated as a final…
This paper proposes a method to evaluate the capability of aggressive legged robot landing under significant touchdown linear and angular velocities upon impact. Our approach builds upon the Planar Inverted Pendulum with Flywheel (PIPF)…
Automatic optimization of robotic behavior has been the long-standing goal of Evolutionary Robotics. Allowing the problem at hand to be solved by automation often leads to novel approaches and new insights. A common problem encountered with…
This paper discusses the design and the performance achievable with active aerodynamic attitude control in very low Earth orbit, i.e. below 450 km in altitude. A novel real-time algorithm is proposed for selecting the angles of deflection…
Perching allows unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to reduce energy consumption, remain anchored for surface sampling operations, or stably survey their surroundings. Previous efforts for perching on vertical surfaces have predominantly…
Precise near-ground trajectory control is difficult for multi-rotor drones, due to the complex aerodynamic effects caused by interactions between multi-rotor airflow and the environment. Conventional control methods often fail to properly…
In this paper we present a vision based hardware-software control system enabling autonomous landing of a multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It allows the detection of a marked landing pad in real-time for a 1280 x 720 @ 60 fps video…