Related papers: SLAP: Slapband-based Autonomous Perching Drone wit…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall…
Perching with winged Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has often been solved by means of complex control or intricate appendages. Here, we present a simple yet novel method that relies on passive wing morphing for crash-landing on trees and other…
Flapping wings are a bio-inspired method to produce lift and thrust in aerial robots, leading to quiet and efficient motion. The advantages of this technology are safety and maneuverability, and physical interaction with the environment,…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles are deployed for a variety tasks including surveillance and monitoring. Perching and staring allow the vehicle to monitor targets without flying, saving battery power and increasing the overall mission time…
Perching on the moving platforms is a promising solution to enhance the endurance and operational range of quadrotors, which could benefit the efficiency of a variety of air-ground cooperative tasks. To ensure robust perching, tracking with…
Multimodal UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are rarely capable of more than two modalities, i.e., flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding…
This study demonstrates a method to locate an ideal perch location on a tree for vision-guided autonomous tree-perching drones. Various image processing algorithms, including those used for machine learning, image segmentation and binary…
Obstacle avoidance is a key feature for safe Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. While solutions have been proposed for static obstacle avoidance, systems enabling avoidance of dynamic objects, such as drones, are hard to implement…
With the emergence of new flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) designs, a need for extensive and advanced mission capabilities arises. FWMAVs try to adapt and emulate the flight features of birds and flying insects. While current…
Autonomous navigation is needed for several robotics applications. In this paper we present an autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) system which purely relies on cost-effective and light-weight passive visual and inertial sensors to…
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…
Protecting and restoring forest ecosystems has become an important conservation issue. Although various robots have been used for field data collection to protect forest ecosystems, the complex terrain and dense canopy make the data…
There are various desired capabilities to create aerial forest-traversing robots capable of monitoring both biological and abiotic data. The features range from multi-functionality, robustness, and adaptability. These robots have to weather…
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…
The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is rapidly increasing in applications ranging from surveillance and first-aid missions to industrial automation involving cooperation with other machines or humans. To maximize area coverage and…
The endurance and energy efficiency of drones remain critical challenges in their design and operation. To extend mission duration, numerous studies explored perching mechanisms that enable drones to conserve energy by temporarily…
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…
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in large-scale, unknown, and complex subterranean environments is a challenging problem. Sensors must operate in off-nominal conditions; uneven and slippery terrains make wheel odometry…
Suitably equipped with cameras and sensors, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be instrumental for wildfire prediction, tracking, and monitoring, provided that uninterrupted connectivity can be guaranteed even if some of the ground access…
Semantic maps represent the environment using a set of semantically meaningful objects. This representation is storage-efficient, less ambiguous, and more informative, thus facilitating large-scale autonomy and the acquisition of actionable…