Related papers: HoLoArm: Deformable Arms for Collision-Tolerant Qu…
Overactuated tilt-rotor platforms offer many advantages over traditional fixed-arm drones, allowing the decoupling of the applied force from the attitude of the robot. This expands their application areas to aerial interaction and…
In this paper, we propose a complete and robust motion planning system for the aggressive flight of autonomous quadrotors. The proposed method is built upon on a classical teach-and-repeat framework, which is widely adopted in…
Modular Aerial Robot Systems (MARS) comprise multiple drone units with reconfigurable connected formations, providing high adaptability to diverse mission scenarios, fault conditions, and payload capacities. However, existing control…
This paper addresses the problem of designing a trajectory tracking control law for a quadrotor UAV, subsequent to complete failure of a single rotor. The control design problem considers the reduced state space which excludes the angular…
This paper presents the design, control, and applications of a multi-segment soft robotic arm. In order to design a soft arm with large load capacity, several design principles are proposed by analyzing two kinds of buckling issues, under…
This paper proposes a new control framework for manipulating soft objects. A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach is used to make the shape of a deformable object reach a set of desired points by controlling a robotic arm which…
Humans are remarkably data-efficient when adapting to new unseen conditions, like driving a new car. In contrast, modern robotic control systems, like neural network policies trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL), are highly specialized…
Recently, learning-based controllers have been shown to push mobile robotic systems to their limits and provide the robustness needed for many real-world applications. However, only classical optimization-based control frameworks offer the…
This paper investigates the application of Deep Reinforcement (DRL) Learning to address motion control challenges in drones for additive manufacturing (AM). Drone-based additive manufacturing promises flexible and autonomous material…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
Single locomotion robots often struggle to adapt in highly variable or uncertain environments, especially in emergencies. In this paper, a multi-modal deformable robot is introduced that can both fly and drive. Compatibility issues with…
Extending the maneuverability of unmanned areal vehicles promises to yield a considerable increase in the areas in which these systems can be used. Some such applications are the performance of more complicated inspection tasks and the…
In this work, we evaluate the use of aerial drone hover constraints in a multisensor fusion of ground robot and drone data to improve the localization performance of a drone. In particular, we build upon our prior work on cooperative…
Achieving both agile maneuverability and high energy efficiency in aerial robots, particularly in dynamic wind environments, remains challenging. Conventional thruster-powered systems offer agility but suffer from high energy consumption,…
In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the time-optimal trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming…
The demining of landmines using drones is challenging; air-releasable payloads are typically non-intelligent (e.g., water balloons or explosives) and deploying them at even low altitudes (~6 meter) is inherently inaccurate due to complex…
Enabling the capability of assessing risk and making risk-aware decisions is essential to applying reinforcement learning to safety-critical robots like drones. In this paper, we investigate a specific case where a nano quadcopter robot…
Soft robotic actuators can simplify the design of controllers when operating in contact-rich environments. Importantly, their passive compliance fundamentally alters contact mechanics by smoothing impacts and distributing forces over large…
This paper addresses the problem of guiding a quadrotor through a predefined sequence of waypoints in cluttered environments, aiming to minimize the flight time while avoiding collisions. Previous approaches either suffer from prolonged…
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…