11 accepted papers
We present a novel robotic front-end for autonomous aerial motion-capture (mocap) in outdoor environments. In previous work, we presented an approach for cooperative detection and tracking (CDT) of a subject using multiple micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs). However, it did not ensure optimal view-point c
Indoor operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV s) poses many challenges due to the lack of GPS signal and cramped spaces. The presence of obstacles in an unfamiliar environment requires reliable state estimation and active algorithms to prevent collisions. In this paper, we present a teleoperated…
Multicamera tracking of humans and animals in outdoor environments is a relevant and challenging problem. Our approach to it involves a team of cooperating microaerial vehicles (MAVs) with on-board cameras only. Deep neural networks (DNNs) often fail at detecting small-scale objects or those that ar
Physical human-UAV interaction (PHUI) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has many possible applications, and a few recent works [1], [2] have shown that it is possible to perform PHUI with a standard quadrotor. However, the intrinsic underactuation of quadrotors may hinder the interaction task and…
In this paper we present a robust quadrotor controller for tracking a reference trajectory in presence of uncertainties and disturbances. A Super Twisting controller is implemented using the recently proposed gain adaptation law [1], [2], which has the advantage of not requiring the knowledge of the
This paper addresses the problem of cooperative aerial transportation of an object using a team of quadrotors. The approach presented to solve this problem accounts for the full dynamics of the system and it is inspired by the literature on reconfigurable cable-driven parallel robots (RCDPR). Using…
In this paper, we present a collision-free indoor navigation algorithm for teleoperated multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Assuming an obstacle rich environment, the algorithm keeps track of detected obstacles in the local surroundings of the robot. The detection part of the algorithm is ba
This paper introduces the CableRobot simulator, which was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA. The simulator is a completely novel approach to the design of motion simulation pl…
Identification of landmarks for outdoor navigation is often performed using computationally expensive computer vision methods or via heavy and expensive multi-spectral and range sensors. Both choices are forbidden on Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) due to limited payload and computational power. However…
In this paper we introduce the design of a light-weight novel flexible-joint arm for light-weight unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which can be used both for safe physical interaction with the environment and it represents also a preliminary step in the direction of performing quick motions for task…
Mobility of a hexarotor UAV in its standard configuration is limited, since all the propeller force vectors are parallel and they achieve only 4-DoF actuation, similar, e.g., to quadrotors. As a consequence, the hexarotor pose cannot track an arbitrary trajectory while the center of mass is tracking…