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Although quadcopters boast impressive traversal capabilities enabled by their omnidirectional maneuverability, the need for continuous pilot control in complex environments impedes their application in GNSS and telemetry-denied scenarios.…

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…

Performing acrobatic maneuvers with quadrotors is extremely challenging. Acrobatic flight requires high thrust and extreme angular accelerations that push the platform to its physical limits. Professional drone pilots often measure their…

This paper addresses the problem of thrust estimation and control for the rotors of small-sized multirotors Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Accurate control of the thrust generated by each rotor during flight is one of the main challenges…

Although manipulation capabilities of aerial robots greatly improved in the last decade, only few works addressed the problem of aerial physical interaction with dynamic environments, proposing strongly model-based approaches. However, in…

Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental vision-based task essential for enabling quadrotors to perform advanced applications. When planning the trajectory, existing approaches both on optimization and learning typically regard quadrotor as a…

Small drones are becoming a part of our everyday life. They are used in a wide variety of commercial applications, and the number of drones in the air is steadily growing. To ensure the safe operation of drones, traffic management rules…

Deploying robot learning methods to aerial robots in unstructured environments remains both challenging and promising. While recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have enabled end-to-end flight control, the field still lacks…

For autonomous vehicles to operate without human intervention, information sharing from local sensors plays a fundamental role. This can be challenging to handle with bandwidth-constrained communication systems, which calls for the adoption…

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…

With the rising popularity of UAVs in the civilian world, we are currently witnessing and paradim shift in terms of operational safety of flying vehicles. Safe and ubiquitous human-system interaction shall remain the core requirement but…

Quadrotors have demonstrated remarkable versatility, yet their full aerobatic potential remains largely untapped due to inherent underactuation and the complexity of aggressive maneuvers. Traditional approaches, separating trajectory…

In this paper, we investigate the problem of enabling a drone to fly through a tilted narrow gap, without a traditional planning and control pipeline. To this end, we propose an end-to-end policy network, which imitates from the traditional…

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) will unlock their true potential once they can operate in groups. To this end, it is essential for them to estimate on-board the relative location of their neighbors. The challenge lies in limiting the mass and…

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…

We develop a data-driven approach for runtime safety monitoring in flight testing, where pilots perform maneuvers on aircraft with uncertain parameters. Because safety violations can arise unexpectedly as a result of these uncertainties,…

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are finding use in applications that place increasing emphasis on robustness to external disturbances including extreme wind. However, traditional multirotor UAV platforms do not directly sense wind;…

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…

In this paper, we investigate the synthesis of piecewise affine feedback controllers to address the problem of safe and robust controller design in robotics based on high-level controls specifications. The methodology is based on…

Unmanned aerial vehicles, and multi-rotors in particular, can now perform dexterous tasks in impervious environments, from infrastructure monitoring to emergency deliveries. Autonomous drone racing has emerged as an ideal benchmark to…