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Quadrotors have gained popularity over the last decade, aiding humans in complex tasks such as search and rescue, mapping and exploration. Despite their mechanical simplicity and versatility compared to other types of aerial vehicles, they…
Catching objects in flight (i.e., thrown objects) is a common daily skill for humans, yet it presents a significant challenge for robots. This task requires a robot with agile and accurate motion, a large spatial workspace, and the ability…
High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small…
Unmanned aerial vehicles have been demonstrated successfully in a variety of tasks, including surveying and sampling tasks over large areas. These vehicles can take many forms. Quadrotors' agility and ability to hover makes them well suited…
A long-cherished vision of drones is to autonomously traverse through clutter to reach every corner of the world using onboard sensing and computation. In this paper, we combine onboard 3D lidar sensing and sim-to-real reinforcement…
Through the implementation of reconfigurability to achieve flexibility and adaptation to tasks by morphology changes rather than by increasing the number of joints, malleable robots present advantages over traditional serial robot arms in…
Aerial robots are evolving from avoiding obstacles to exploiting the environmental contact interactions for navigation, exploration and manipulation. A key challenge in such aerial physical interactions lies in handling uncertain contact…
Drones, like most airborne aerial vehicles, face inherent disadvantages in achieving agile flight due to their limited thrust capabilities. These physical constraints cannot be fully addressed through advancements in control algorithms…
Aerial robots are required to remain operational even in the event of system disturbances, damages, or failures to ensure resilient and robust task completion and safety. One common failure case is propeller damage, which presents a…
The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges.…
This paper introduces a novel compliant mechanism combining lightweight and energy dissipation for aerial physical interaction. Weighting 400~g at take-off, the mechanism is actuated in the forward body direction, enabling precise position…
We present SMORS, the first Soft fully actuated MultirOtoR System for multimodal locomotion. Unlike conventional hexarotors, SMORS is equipped with three rigid and three continuously soft arms, with each arm hosting a propeller. We create a…
A novel quadcopter capable of changing shape mid-flight is presented, allowing for operation in four configurations with the capability of sustained hover in three. This is accomplished without requiring actuators beyond the four motors…
Birds in nature perform perching not only for rest but also for interaction with human such as the relationship with falconers. Recently, researchers achieve perching-capable aerial robots as a way to save energy, and deformable structure…
Although quadrotors, and aerial robots in general, are inherently active agents, their perceptual capabilities in literature so far have been mostly passive in nature. Researchers and practitioners today use traditional computer vision…
We demonstrate the possibility of learning drone swarm controllers that are zero-shot transferable to real quadrotors via large-scale multi-agent end-to-end reinforcement learning. We train policies parameterized by neural networks that are…
Soft-actuated insect-scale micro aerial vehicles (IMAVs) pose unique challenges for designing robust and computationally efficient controllers. At the millimeter scale, fast robot dynamics ($\sim$ms), together with system delay, model…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become pivotal in domains spanning military, agriculture, surveillance, and logistics, revolutionizing data collection and environmental interaction. With the advancement in drone technology, there is a…
In this work, the joint-control strategy is presented for the humanoid robot, PANDORA, whose structural components are designed to be compliant. As opposed to contemporary approaches which design the elasticity internal to the actuator…
Nowadays, autonomous mobile robots support people in many areas where human presence either redundant or too dangerous. They have successfully proven themselves in expeditions, gas industry, mines, warehouses, etc. However, even legged…