21 accepted papers
MAVs have great potential to assist humans in complex tasks, with applications ranging from logistics to emergency response. Their agility makes them ideal for operations in complex and dynamic environments. However, achieving precise control in agile flights remains a significant challenge, particu…
Aerial transportation using quadrotors with cable-suspended payloads holds great potential for applications in disaster response, logistics, and infrastructure maintenance. However, their hybrid and underactuated dynamics pose significant control and perception challenges. Traditional approaches oft
Aerial transportation using quadrotors with cable-suspended payloads holds great potential for applications in disaster response, logistics, and infrastructure maintenance. However, their hybrid and underactuated dynamics pose significant control and perception challenges. Traditional approaches oft…
Aerial transportation robots using suspended cables have emerged as versatile platforms for disaster response and rescue operations. To maximize the capabilities of these systems, robots need to aggressively fly through tightly constrained environments, such as dense forests and structurally unsafe
Aerial transportation robots using suspended cables have emerged as versatile platforms for disaster response and rescue operations. To maximize the capabilities of these systems, robots need to aggressively fly through tightly constrained environments, such as dense forests and structurally unsafe …
Planning collision free trajectories in complex environments remains a core challenge in robotics. Existing corridor based planners which rely on decomposition of the free space into collision free subsets scale poorly with environmental complexity and require explicit allocations of time windows to…
Multi-quadrotor systems face significant challenges in decentralized control, particularly with safety and coordination under sensing and communication limitations. State-of-the-art methods leverage Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to provide safety guarantees but often neglect actuation constraints
Quadrotors equipped with cable-suspended loads represent a versatile, low-cost, and energy efficient solution for aerial transportation, construction, and manipulation tasks. However, their real-world deployment is hindered by several challenges. The system is difficult to control because it is nonl
In this paper, we present a novel trajectory planning algorithm for cooperative manipulation with multiple quadrotors using control barrier functions (CBFs). Our approach addresses the complex dynamics of a system in which a team of quadrotors transports and manipulates a cable-suspended rigid-body
The ability of aerial robots to operate in the presence of failures is crucial in various applications that demand continuous operations, such as surveillance, monitoring, and inspection. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant control strategy for quadrotors that can adapt to single and dual com…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) such as quadrotors equipped with manipulation mechanisms have the potential to assist humans in tasks such as construction and package delivery. Cables are a promising option for manipulation mechanisms due to their low weight, low cost, and simple design. How…
Aerial robots can enhance their safe and agile navigation in complex and cluttered environments by efficiently exploiting the information collected during a given task. In this paper, we address the learning model predictive control problem for quadrotors. We design a learning receding-horizon nonli…
Accurately modeling quadrotor's system dynamics is critical for guaranteeing agile, safe, and stable navigation. The model needs to capture the system behavior in multiple flight regimes and operating conditions, including those producing highly nonlinear effects such as aerodynamic forces and torqu
In this paper, we address the vision-based detection and tracking problems of multiple aerial vehicles using a single camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) as well as the corresponding perception consensus problem (i.e., uniqueness and identical IDs across all observing agents). We design sever…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall mission time without actively flying. In this paper, we addr…
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the great potential to be deployed in commercial or health care services such as e-commerce package delivery, transportation of medicines, same-day food delivery, and other time-sensitive transportation tasks. A team of MAVs can cooperatively transport objects to ov
In this paper, we address the Perception– Constrained Model Predictive Control (PCMPC) and state estimation problems for quadrotors with cable suspended payloads using a single camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). We design a receding–horizon control strategy for cable suspended payloads dire…
Quadrotor flight in cluttered, unknown environments is challenging due to the limited range of perception sensors, challenging obstacles, and limited onboard computation. In this work, we directly address these challenges by proposing an efficient, reactive planning approach. We introduce the Bitwis…
In this work we introduce ModQuad-DoF, a modular flying robotic structure with enhanced capabilities for yaw actuation. We propose a new module design that allows a one degree of freedom relative motion between the flying robot and the cage, with a docking mechanism allowing rigid connections betwee…
Flying modular robots have the potential to rapidly form temporary structures. In the literature, docking actions rely on external systems and indoor infrastructures for relative pose estimation. In contrast to related work, we provide local estimation during the self-assembly process to avoid depen…
We introduce ModQuad, a novel flying modular robotic structure that is able to self-assemble in midair and cooperatively fly. The structure is composed by agile flying modules that can easily move in a three dimensional environment. The module is based on a quadrotor platform within a cuboid frame w…