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Quadrotors with the ability to perch on moving inclined surfaces can save energy and extend their travel distance by leveraging ground vehicles. Achieving dynamic perching places high demands on the performance of trajectory planning and…
Fixed-wing small uncrewed aerial vehicles (sUAVs) possess the capability to remain airborne for extended durations and traverse vast distances. However, their operation is susceptible to wind conditions, particularly in regions of complex…
We consider a single kinematically controlled robot with a bounded control range. The robot travels in a two-dimensional region supporting an unknown unsteady scalar field. A single sensor provides the field value at the current location of…
Two-stage methods addressing continuous shortest path problems start local minimization from discrete shortest paths in a spatial graph. The convergence of such hybrid methods to global minimizers hinges on the discretization error induced…
Wind farms are a crucial driver toward the generation of ecological and renewable energy. Due to their rapid increase in capacity, contemporary wind farms need to adhere to strict constraints on power output to ensure stability of the…
We develop a learning-based control algorithm for unknown dynamical systems under very severe data limitations. Specifically, the algorithm has access to streaming and noisy data only from a single and ongoing trial. It accomplishes such…
Insects excel in trajectory and attitude handling during flight, yet the specific kinematic behaviours they use for maintaining stability in air disturbances are not fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive strategies of…
The design of mission scenarios for the flyby investigation of nearby star systems by probes launched using directed energy is addressed. Multiple probes are launched with a fixed launch infrastructure, and download of scientific data…
Although battery technology has advanced tremendously over the past decade, it continues to be a bottleneck for the mass adoption of electric aircraft in long-haul cargo and passenger delivery. The onboard energy is expected to be utilized…
This paper presents a round-trip strategy of multirotors subject to unknown flow disturbances. During the outbound flight, the vehicle immediately utilizes the wind disturbance estimations in feedback control, as an attempt to reduce the…
Avian-informed drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control…
This study presents a real-time guidance strategy for an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be used to enhance their flight endurance by utilizing {\sl insitu} measurements of wind speeds and wind gradients. In these strategies,…
This thesis presents a solution that enables aerial robots to reason about surrounding wind flow fields in real time using on board sensors and embedded flight hardware. The core novelty of this research is the fusion of range measurements…
The problem of energy harvesting from flutter instabilities in flexible slender structures in axial flows is considered. In a recent study, we used a reduced order theoretical model of such a system to demonstrate the feasibility for…
Limited flight range is a common problem for multicopters. To alleviate this problem, we propose a method for finding the optimal speed and heading of a multicopter when flying a given path to achieve the longest flight range. Based on a…
Monin--Obukhov Similarity Theory (MOST), which underpins nearly all bulk estimates of surface fluxes in the atmospheric surface layer, assumes monotonic wind profiles and vertically uniform momentum and heat fluxes. Here, we show that…
Recently, there have been numerous advances in the development of biologically inspired lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). While autonomous navigation is fairly straight-forward for large UAVs as expensive sensors and monitoring…
In this paper, we investigate optimal boundary control problems for Cahn-Hilliard variational inequalities with a dynamic boundary condition involving double obstacle potentials and the Laplace-Beltrami operator. The cost functional is of…
Terrestrial animals and robots are susceptible to flipping-over during rapid locomotion in complex terrains. However, small robots are less capable of self-righting from an upside-down orientation compared to small animals like insects.…
The reduced sensitivity of mean Southern Ocean zonal transport with respect to surface wind stress magnitude changes, known as eddy saturation, is studied in an idealised analytical model. The model is based on the assumption of a balance…