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For quadrotors, achieving safe and autonomous flight in complex environments with wind disturbances and dynamic obstacles still faces significant challenges. Most existing methods address wind disturbances in either trajectory planning or…
Skysails Power GmbH is the leading manufacturer of light and efficient power kites that harness the wind's untapped supplies at high altitudes, aiming at profoundly altering wind energy's impact in achieving the global energy transition.…
Small, low-speed fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating autonomously, beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) will inevitably encounter winds rising to levels near or exceeding the vehicles' nominal airspeed. In this paper, we…
The quest for the optimal navigation strategy in a complex environment is at the heart of microswimmer applications like cargo carriage or drug targeting to cancer cells. Here, we formulate a variational Fermat's principle for microswimmers…
An innovative sort of mobility platform that can both drive and fly is the air-ground robot. The need for an agile flight cannot be satisfied by traditional path planning techniques for air-ground robots. Prior studies had mostly focused on…
The wind is one of the most increasingly used renewable energy resources. Accurate and reliable forecast of wind speed is necessary for efficient power production; however, it is not an easy task because it depends upon meteorological…
Reliably predicting the geomorphology and climate of planetary bodies requires knowledge of the dynamic threshold wind shear velocity below which saltation transport ceases. Here we measure this threshold in a wind tunnel for four…
Using constraint-based local search, we effectively model and efficiently solve the problem of balancing the traffic demands on portions of the European airspace while ensuring that their capacity constraints are satisfied. The traffic…
Aerial robots show significant potential for forest canopy research and environmental monitoring by providing data collection capabilities at high spatial and temporal resolutions. However, limited flight endurance hinders their…
Autonomous unpowered flight is a challenge for control and guidance systems: all the energy the aircraft might use during flight has to be harvested directly from the atmosphere. We investigate the design of an algorithm that optimizes the…
Observations and theory suggest that line driven winds from hot stars and luminous accretion disks adopt a unique, critical solution which corresponds to maximum mass loss rate. We analyze the numerical stability of the infinite family of…
We develop a mathematical model for sailboat navigation that can play the same role that the Black and Scholes model plays in mathematical finance: it captures essential features of sailboat navigation, it can provide insights that might…
We develop data-driven algorithms for reachability analysis and control of systems with a priori unknown nonlinear dynamics. The resulting algorithms not only are suitable for settings with real-time requirements but also provide provable…
Bio-inspired methods can provide efficient solutions to perform autonomous landing for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Flying insects such as honeybees perform vertical landings by keeping flow divergence constant. This leads to an exponential…
Ocean wave energy is a source of renewable energy that has gained much attention for its potential to contribute significantly to meeting the global energy demand. In this research, we investigate the problem of maximising the energy…
This paper presents real-time guidance strategies for 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, periodic…
The aim of this study is to give insights into the trajectory optimization w.r.t. energy consumption and recuperation for stacker cranes in a high-bay warehouse. Based on an analytical necessary optimality condition, a targeted numerical…
We consider piecewise-deterministic optimal control problems in which the environment randomly switches among several deterministic modes, and the goal is to optimize the expected cost up to the termination while taking the likelihood of…
This work develops feasible path trajectories for a coordinated strike with multiple aircraft in a constrained environment. Using direct orthogonal collocation methods, the two-point boundary value optimal control problem is transcribed…
Sailing robots provide a low-cost solution to conduct the ocean missions such as marine exploration, pollution detection, and border surveillance, etc. However, compared with other propeller-driven surface vessels, sailboat suffers in…