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Jake Welde

7 accepted papers

2025

Leveling the Playing Field: Carefully Comparing Classical and Learned Controllers for Quadrotor Trajectory Tracking

RSS 2025poster

Learning-based control approaches like reinforcement learning (RL) have recently produced a slew of impressive results for tasks like quadrotor trajectory tracking and drone racing. Naturally, it is common to demonstrate the advantages of these new controllers against established methods like analyt…

Cited by 0PDFScholar
2025

Leveraging Symmetry to Accelerate Learning of Trajectory Tracking Controllers for Free-Flying Robotic Systems

ICRA 2025

Tracking controllers enable robotic systems to accurately follow planned reference trajectories. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in the synthesis of controllers for systems with complex dynamics and modest online compute budgets. However, the poor sample efficiency of RL

Cited by 3SourcecodeScholar
2023

The Role of Symmetry in Constructing Geometric Flat Outputs for Free-Flying Robotic Systems

ICRA 2023poster

Mechanical systems naturally evolve on principal bundles describing their inherent symmetries. The ensuing factorization of the configuration manifold into a symmetry group and an internal shape space has provided deep insights into the locomotion of many robotic and biological systems. On the other…

Cited by 11SourceScholar
2023

Trajectory Planning for the Bidirectional Quadrotor as a Differentially Flat Hybrid System

ICRA 2023poster

The use of bidirectional propellers provides quadrotors with greater maneuverability which is advantageous in constrained environments. This paper addresses the development of a trajectory planning algorithm for quadrotors with bidirectional motors. Previous work has shown that the property of diffe…

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2017

Autonomous Flight for Detection, Localization, and Tracking of Moving Targets With a Small Quadrotor

RA-L 2017

In this letter, we address the autonomous flight of a small quadrotor, enabling tracking of a moving object. The 15-cm diameter, 250-g robot relies only on onboard sensors (a single camera and an inertial measurement unit) and computers, and can detect, localize, and track moving objects. Our key co

Cited by 118SourceScholar