41 accepted papers
Biological neural networks continuously adapt and modify themselves in response to experiences throughout their lifetime - a capability largely absent in artificial neural networks. Hebbian plasticity offers a promising path toward rapid adaptation in changing environments. Here, we introduce Hebbia…
An aircraft's airspeed, angle of attack, and angle of side slip are crucial to its safety, especially when flying close to the stall regime. Various solutions exist, including pitot tubes, angular vanes, and multihole pressure probes. However, current sensors are either too heavy (>30 g) or require …
Aerial swarms can substantially improve the effectiveness of drones in applications such as inspection, monitoring, and search for rescue. This is especially true when those swarms are made of several individual drones that use local sensing and coordination rules to achieve collective motion. Despi
The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient solution. However, morphing drones require the addition of actua…
Control design for robotic systems is complex and often requires solving an optimization to follow a trajectory accurately. Online optimization approaches like Model Predictive Control (MPC) have been shown to achieve great tracking performance, but require high computing power. Conversely, learning…
Fixed-wing drones must navigate to the desired location accurately for maneuvers such as picking up objects and perching. However, current GNSS receivers limit their navigation accuracy to several meters in outdoor environments, making such maneuvers impossible. RTK GNSS can improve flight accuracy,…
Teleoperators rely on both visual and haptic feedback to perform drone teleoperation tasks, such as obstacle avoidance. Haptic feedback becomes essential when visual feedback is compromised, either due to visual occlusions or poor depth perception. However, haptic interfaces, are often bulky because
Recent works in aerial robotics show that the self-organized and cohesive flight of swarms can emerge from the exchange of purely local information between neighboring agents. However, most of the current swarm models are not capable of flight in densely cluttered environments. Predictive models hav
Electro-adhesive clutches have become effective tools for variable stiffness functions in many robotic systems due to their light weight, high speed and strong brake force. In this paper, we present a novel, tubular design of an electro-adhesive clutch. Our clutch consists of flexible electrode shee…
Cargo drones are designed to carry payloads with predefined shape, size, and/or mass. This lack of flexibility requires a fleet of diverse drones tailored to specific cargo dimensions. Here we propose a new reconfigurable drone based on a modular design that adapts to different cargo shapes, sizes,
Winged drones that fly in close proximity to obstacles or that are capable of aerial and terrestrial locomotion can benefit from protective systems that prevent damage to delicate aerial structures. Existing protective solutions focus on multi-copter drones and consist of adding structures, such as
Robots using classical control have revolutionised assembly lines where the environment and manipulated objects are restricted and predictable. However, they have proven less effective when the manipulated objects are deformable due to their complex and unpredictable behaviour. The use of tactile se…
Drones have shown to be useful aerial vehicles for unmanned transport missions such as food and medical supply delivery. This can be leveraged to deliver life-saving nutrition and medicine for people in emergency situations. However, commercial drones can generally only carry 10 %–30 % of their own…
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are being used in a wide range of applications such as surveillance, reconnaissance, inspection, and search and rescue. However, due to their size and mission profiles, they are prone to tipping over, jeopardizing their operation. Self-righting is an open challenge for f
The control of collective robotic systems, such as drone swarms, is often delegated to autonomous navigation algorithms due to their high dimensionality. However, like other robotic entities, drone swarms can still benefit from being teleoperated by human operators, whose perception and decision-mak
We address the detection, tracking, and relative localization of the agents of a drone swarm from a human perspective using a headset equipped with a single camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). We train and deploy a deep neural network detector on image data to detect the drones. A joint p
Dynamic environments such as urban areas are still challenging for popular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithms. Existing datasets typically fail to capture the dynamic nature of these environments, therefore making it difficult to quantitatively evaluate the robustness of existing VIO methods.
Decentralized deployment of drone swarms usually relies on inter-agent communication or visual markers that are mounted on the vehicles to simplify their mutual detection. This letter proposes a vision-based detection and tracking algorithm that enables groups of drones to navigate without communica
Delivery drones used by logistics companies today are equipped with unshielded propellers, which represent a major hurdle for in-hand parcel delivery. The exposed propeller blades are hazardous to unsuspecting bystanders, pets, and untrained users. One solution to provide safety is to enclose a dron
This paper presents a method to create fish-like robots with tensegrity systems and describes a prototype modeled on the body shape of the rainbow trout with a length of 400 mm and a mass of 102 g that is driven by a waterproof servomotor. The structure of the tensegrity robot consists of rigid body…
The conventional approach to parcel placement in most delivery drone designs today is to place the parcel centrally beneath the drone's rotor plane. However, if the parcel is too large, this will result in an obstruction of the propeller slipstream, incurring significant drag. As such, the parcel's
Besides being part of the Internet of Things (IoT), drones can play a relevant role in it as enablers. The 3D mobility of UAVs can be exploited to improve node localization in IoT networks for, e.g., search and rescue or goods localization and tracking. One of the widespread IoT communication techno…
Drone teleoperation is usually accomplished using remote radio controllers, devices that can be hard to master for inexperienced users. Moreover, the limited amount of information fed back to the user about the robot's state, often limited to vision, can represent a bottleneck for operation in sever…
Human-Robot Interfaces (HRIs) can be hard to master for inexperienced users, making the teleoperation of mobile robots a difficult task. The development of Body-Machine Interfaces (BoMIs) represents a promising approach to making a user more proficient, by exploiting the natural control they can exe
Among the available solutions for drone swarm simulations, we identified a lack of simulation frameworks that allow easy algorithms prototyping, tuning, debugging and performance analysis. Moreover, users who want to dive in the research field of drone swarms often need to interface with multiple pr…
Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have penetrated multiple domains over the past years. In GNSS-denied or indoor environments, aerial robots require a robust and stable localization system, often with external feedback, in order to fly safely. Motion capture systems are typically utilized indoors…
Decentralized drone swarms deployed today either rely on sharing of positions among agents or detecting swarm members with the help of visual markers. This letter proposes an entirely visual approach to coordinate markerless drone swarms based on imitation learning. Each agent is controlled by a sma
Haptic feedback located on the torso is proposed to enhance the state awareness of a user in virtual reality or during teleoperation while leaving the hands free for manipulation and communication. We provide haptic feedback on the torso by compressing a set of closed air pouches against the skin in
The recent advances in state estimation, perception, and navigation algorithms have significantly contributed to the ubiquitous use of quadrotors for inspection, mapping, and aerial imaging. To further increase the versatility of quadrotors, recent works investigated the use of an adaptive morpholog
Most human–drone interfaces, such as joysticks and remote controllers, require attention and developed skills during teleoperation. Wearable interfaces could enable a more natural and intuitive control of drones, which would make this technology accessible to a larger population of users. In this le
Drones are rapidly becoming an affordable and often faster solution for parcel delivery than terrestrial vehicles. Existing transportation drones and software infrastructures are mostly designed by logistics companies for trained users and dedicated infrastructure, and are to be used for either long
Remote magnetic navigation of catheters is a technique used to perform radiofrequency ablation of heart tissue in order to treat cardiac arrhythmias. The flexible magnetic catheters used in this context are in some cases not sufficiently dexterous to navigate the complex and patient-specific anatomy…
Bio-inspired underwater robots have several benefits compared to traditional underwater vehicles such as agility, efficiency, and environmentally friendly body. However, bio-inspired underwater robots developed so far have a single swimming mode, which may limit their capability to perform different…
Semi- or fully autonomous personal aerial vehicles (PAVs) are currently studied and developed by public and private organizations as a solution for traffic congestion. While optimal collision-free navigation algorithms have been proposed for autonomous robots, trajectories and accelerations for PAVs
The ease of use and versatility of drones has contributed to their deployment in several fields, from entertainment to search and rescue. However, drones remain vulnerable to collisions due to pilot mistakes or various system failures. This letter presents a bioinspired strategy for the design of qu
We present a fully edible pneumatic actuator based on gelatin-glycerol material. The actuator is monolithic, fabricated via a molding process, and measures 90 mm in length, 20 mm in width, and 17 mm in thickness. Thanks to the material mechanical characteristics similar to those of silicone elastome…
Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs), a soft actuator technology, hold great promise for biomimetic underwater robots. The high-voltages required to drive DEAs can however make them challenging to use in water. This paper demonstrates a method to create DEA-based biomimetic swimming robots that ope…
In a team of autonomous drones, individual knowledge about the relative location of teammates is essential. Existing relative positioning solutions for teams of small drones mostly rely on external systems such as motion tracking cameras or GPS satellites that might not always be accessible. In this
Teams of fixed wing micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) could provide a wide area coverage and relay data in wireless ad-hoc networks. In such applications fixed wing MAVs have to be able to regulate an inter-robot distance. Fixed wing MAVs have reduced maneuverability, that is, they cannot perform sharp t…
A novel variable stiffness actuator composed of a dielectric elastomer actuator (DEA) and a low-melting-point-alloy (LMPA) embedded silicone substrate is demonstrated. The device which we call variable stiffness dielectric elastomer actuator (VSDEA) enables functional soft robots with a simplified s…