12 accepted papers
Recent advancements in visual odometry systems have improved autonomous navigation, yet challenges persist in complex environments like forests, where dense foliage, variable lighting, and repetitive textures compromise the accuracy of feature correspondences. To address these challenges, we introdu…
Recent advancements in visual odometry systems have improved autonomous navigation, yet challenges persist in complex environments like forests, where dense foliage, variable lighting, and repetitive textures compromise the accuracy of feature correspondences. To address these challenges, we introdu
Protecting and restoring forest ecosystems has become an important conservation issue. Although various robots have been used for field data collection to protect forest ecosystems, the complex terrain and dense canopy make the data collection less efficient. To address this challenge, an aerial pla
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 application. Inspired by natural perching behaviours, we propose a mult…
We present a virtual reality (VR) teleoperation interface for a ground-based robot, featuring dense 3D environment reconstruction and a low latency video stream, with which operators can immersively explore remote environments. At the UK Atomic Energy Authority's (UKAEA) Remote Applications in Chall…
Aerial robots have a wide range of applications, such as collecting data in hard-to-reach areas. This requires the longest possible operation time. However, because currently available commercial batteries have limited specific energy of roughly 300 W h kg-1, a drone's flight time is a bottleneck fo…
Accessing and interacting with difficult to reach surfaces at various orientations is of interest within a variety of industrial contexts. Thus far, the predominant robotic solution to such a problem has been to leverage the maneuverability of a fully actuated, omnidirectional aerial manipulator. Su
The recent momentum in aerial manipulation has led to an interest in developing virtual reality interfaces for aerial physical interaction tasks with simple, intuitive, and reliable control and perception. However, this requires the use of expensive subsystems and there is still a research gap betwe…
Current aerial robots are increasingly adaptive; they can morph to enable operation in changing conditions to complete diverse missions. Each mission may require the robot to conduct a different task. A conventional learning approach can handle these variations when the system is trained for similar…
Optical flow sensors and optical flow divergence (OFD) have offered partial solutions for obstacle avoidance, landing, and perching with micro aerial vehicles. Theoretically, OFD can indicate the risk of collision, providing that the sensors' field of view is bounded within a single flat surface on
Multi-directional aerial platforms can fly in almost any orientation and direction, often maneuvering in ways their underactuated counterparts cannot match. A subset of multi-directional platforms is fully-actuated multirotors, where all six degrees of freedom are independently controlled without re
Being motivated by ceiling inspection applications via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which require close proximity flight to surfaces, a systematic control approach enabling safe and accurate close proximity flight is proposed in this work. There are two main challenges for close proximity flights…