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This paper presents an autonomous aerial system specifically engineered for operation in challenging marine GNSS-denied environments, aimed at transporting small cargo from a target vessel. In these environments, characterized by weakly…
One of the main limitations of multirotor UAVs is their short flight time due to battery constraints. A practical solution for continuous operation is to power the drone from the ground via a tether. While this approach has been…
Perching allows unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to reduce energy consumption, remain anchored for surface sampling operations, or stably survey their surroundings. Previous efforts for perching on vertical surfaces have predominantly…
We introduce UFO, a modular aerial robotic platform for transforming a rigid object into a multirotor robot. To achieve this, we develop flight modules, in the form of a control module and propelling modules, that can be affixed to an…
Full autonomy for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) requires the capability to autonomously detect potential landing sites in unknown and unstructured terrain, allowing for self-governed mission completion or handling of emergency…
Heterogeneous autonomous robot teams consisting of multirotor and uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) have the potential to enable various maritime applications, including advanced search-and-rescue operations. A critical requirement of these…
This paper introduces an innovative approach for the autonomous landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) using only a front-facing monocular camera, therefore obviating the requirement for depth estimation cameras. Drawing on the inherent…
Payload grasping and transportation with quadcopters is an active research area that has rapidly developed over the last decade. To grasp a payload without human interaction, most state-of-the-art approaches apply robotic arms that are…
In this paper, we develop a position estimation system for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles formed by hardware and software. It is based on low-cost devices: GPS, commercial autopilot sensors and dense optical flow algorithm implemented in an…
In this paper we present a vision based hardware-software control system enabling autonomous landing of a multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). It allows the detection of a marked landing pad in real-time for a 1280 x 720 @ 60 fps video…
The expectation of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) pushes the operation environment to narrow spaces, where the systems may fly very close to an object and perform an interaction. This phase brings the variation in UAV dynamics: thrust and…
Though control algorithms for multirotor Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) are well understood, the configuration, parameter estimation, and tuning of flight control algorithms takes quite some time and resources. In previous work, we have shown…
Autonomous landing in cluttered or unstructured environments remains a safety-critical challenge for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly under noisy perception caused by sensor uncertainty and platform-induced disturbances such as…
As the number of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating in low-altitude airspace continues to increase, non-cooperative targets pose growing challenges to low-altitude operations. To address this issue, this paper proposes a…
The interaction of robots with bendable objects in midair presents significant challenges in control, often resulting in performance degradation and potential crashes, especially for aerial robots due to their limited actuation capabilities…
Capabilities of long-range flight and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) are essential for Urban Air Mobility (UAM). Tiltrotor VTOLs have the advantage of balancing control simplicity and system complexity due to their redundant control…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…
In this paper, we introduce a new quadcopter fail-safe flight solution that can perform the same four controllable degrees-of-freedom flight as a regular multirotor even when a single thruster fails. The new solution employs a novel…
We propose a multibody model of a freewing UAV. This model allows obtaining simulations of the UAV's behaviour and, in the future, to design a control law stabilising the entire flight envelope (hovering and forward flight). We also…
This paper aims to develop a Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) architecture, for the case of a damaged actuator for a multirotor UAV that can be applied across multirotor platforms based on their Attainable Virtual Control Set (AVCS). The…