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Star-shaped Tilted Hexarotors are rapidly emerging for applications highly demanding in terms of robustness and maneuverability. To ensure improvement in such features, a careful selection of the tilt angles is mandatory. In this work, we…
Perching is a promising solution for a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to save energy and extend operation time. This paper proposes a quadrotor that can perch on planar structures using the ceiling effect. Compared with the existing…
Hybrid unmanned aircraft can significantly increase the potential of micro air vehicles, because they combine hovering capability with a wing for fast and efficient forward flight. However, these vehicles are very difficult to control,…
Airships offer unique operational advantages due to their ability to generate lift via buoyancy, enabling low-speed flight and stationary hovering. These capabilities make them ideal for missions requiring endurance and precision…
The flow around a symmetric aerofoil (NACA 0012) with an array of flexible flaplets attached to the trailing edge has been investigated at Reynolds numbers of 100,000 - 150,000 by using High-Speed Time-Resolved Particle Image Velocimetry…
Rigid link flapping mechanisms remain the most practical choice for flapping wing micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) to carry useful payloads and onboard batteries for free flight due to their long-term durability and reliability. However, MAVs…
The tailsitter vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) UAV is widely used due to its lower dead weight, which eliminates the actuators and mechanisms for tilting. However, the tailsitter UAV is susceptible to wind disturbances in multi-rotor…
We investigate the effect of wing twist flexibility on lift and efficiency of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle capable of liftoff. Wings used previously were chosen to be fully rigid due to modeling and fabrication constraints. However,…
Sliding tasks performed by aerial robots are valuable for inspection and simple maintenance tasks at height, such as non-destructive testing and painting. Although various end-effector designs have been used for such tasks, non-actuated…
This article proposes a modular optimal control framework for local three-dimensional ellipsoidal obstacle avoidance, exemplarily applied to model predictive path-following control. Static as well as moving obstacles are considered. Central…
Interactional aerodynamics of a quadcopter in hover is numerically investigated in this study. The main objective is to understand major flow structures associated with unsteady airloads on multirotor aircraft. The overset mesh approach is…
Limited flight distance and time is a common problem for multicopters. We propose a method for finding the optimal speed and sideslip angle of a multicopter flying a given path to achieve either the longest flight distance or time. Since…
With the growing demand for electricity and increasing interest in renewable energy, wind turbine noise pollution has become a more pressing issue. Aerodynamic noise not only impacts human well-being but also affects wildlife. This study…
Enabling vertical take-off and landing while providing the ability to fly long ranges opens the door to a wide range of new real-world aircraft applications while improving many existing tasks. Tiltrotor vertical take-off and landing (VTOL)…
Collaborative aerial transportation of tethered payloads is fundamentally limited by space, power, and weight constraints. Conventional approaches rely on static equilibrium conditions, where each vehicle tilts to generate the forces that…
The flight time of multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is typically constrained by their high power consumption. Tethered power systems present a viable solution to extend flight times while maintaining the advantages of multirotor…
Utilizing wind hovering techniques of soaring birds can save energy expenditure and improve the flight endurance of micro air vehicles (MAVs). Here, we present a novel method for fully autonomous orographic soaring without a priori…
Tilt-rotor aerial robots are more dynamic and versatile than fixed-rotor platforms, since the thrust vector and body orientation are decoupled. However, the coordination of servos and propellers (the allocation problem) is not trivial,…
Conventional multi-rotors are under-actuated systems, hindering them from independently controlling attitude from position. In this study, we present several distinct configurations that incorporate additional control inputs for…
The present work is concerned with the shape optimization of flapping wings in forward flight. The analysis is performed by combining a gradient-based optimizer with the unsteady vortex lattice method (UVLM). We describe the UVLM…