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Marco Tognon

36 accepted papers

2026

A Nonlinear MPC for Physical Human-Aerial Robot Interaction in Collaborative Transportation Tasks

Antonio Gonzalez-Morgado, Jonas Soueidan, Guillermo Heredia, Anibal Ollero, Philippe Fraisse, Marco Tognon +1
ICRA 2026poster

Aerial robots are transitioning from traditional surveillance and monitoring roles to more advanced tasks involving physical interaction. Despite this progress, physical Human-Aerial Robot Interaction remains largely underexplored due to the complexity and stability-related issues of such platforms.…

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2026

Distributed NMPC for Cooperative Aerial Manipulation of Cable-Suspended Loads

Nicola De Carli, Riccardo Belletti, Emanuele Buzzurro, Andrea Testa, Giuseppe Notarstefano, Marco Tognon
ICRA 2026poster

In this paper, we address the problem of cooperative manipulation of a cable-suspended load by a team of aerial robots. Unlike classical approaches that rely on centralized controllers, we propose a Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (DNMPC) framework in which the UAVs communicate over a…

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2026

From Pixels to Touch: Direct Tactile Servoing With Learned Photometric Normalization

Lluis Prior Sancho, Tommaso Belvedere, Marco Tognon
RA-L 2026

Vision-Based Tactile Sensors (VBTSs) offer high-resolution contact information essential for robust robotic contact-rich manipulation under occlusions and variable lighting. Direct Visual Servoing (DVS) is an interesting alternative to classical Position-Based Visual Servoing (PBVS) as it operates d

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2026

How to Shake Trees with Aerial Manipulators? a Theoretical and Experimental Study

Antonio Gonzalez-Morgado, Eugenio Cuniato, Guillermo Heredia, Anibal Ollero, Roland Siegwart, Marco Tognon
ICRA 2026poster

Aerial manipulators are advancing beyond traditional inspection roles to enable complex interactions with flexible structures. Applications such as structural health monitoring, and especially agricultural tasks like fruit harvesting or environmental monitoring, require inducing controlled vibration…

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2026

QP-Based Inner-Loop Control for Constraint-Safe and Robust Trajectory Tracking for Aerial Robots

Lorenzo Balandi, Paolo Robuffo Giordano, Marco Tognon
ICRA 2026poster

Accurate trajectory tracking is crucial in aerial robotics. Optimal control methods such as Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) are able to track trajectories exploiting the full nonlinear dynamics while respecting constraints. However, the NMPC model-based nature makes it sensitive to mismatc…

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

A Nonlinear MPC for Physical Human-Aerial Robot Interaction in Collaborative Transportation Tasks

Antonio González-Morgado, Jonas Soueidan, Guillermo Heredia, Aníbal Ollero, Philippe Fraisse, Marco Tognon +1
RA-L 2025

Aerial robots are transitioning from traditional surveillance and monitoring roles to more advanced tasks involving physical interaction. Despite this progress, physical Human-Aerial Robot Interaction remains largely underexplored due to the complexity and stability-related issues of such platforms.

Cited by 2Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

How to Shake Trees With Aerial Manipulators? A Theoretical and Experimental Study

Antonio González-Morgado, Eugenio Cuniato, Guillermo Heredia, Aníbal Ollero, Roland Siegwart, Marco Tognon
RA-L 2025

Aerial manipulators are advancing beyond traditional inspection roles to enable complex interactions with flexible structures. Applications such as structural health monitoring, and especially agricultural tasks like fruit harvesting or environmental monitoring, require inducing controlled vibration

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

QP-Based Inner-Loop Control for Constraint-Safe and Robust Trajectory Tracking for Aerial Robots

Lorenzo Balandi, Paolo Robuffo Giordano, Marco Tognon
RA-L 2025

Accurate trajectory tracking is crucial in aerial robotics. Optimal control methods such as Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) are able to track trajectories exploiting the full nonlinear dynamics while respecting constraints. However, the NMPC model-based nature makes it sensitive to mismatc

Cited by 3Source ↗Scholar ↗
2024

Passive Aligning Physical Interaction of Fully-Actuated Aerial Vehicles for Pushing Tasks

Tong Hui, Eugenio Cuniato, Michael Pantic, Marco Tognon, Matteo Fumagalli, Roland Siegwart
ICRA 2024poster

Recently, the utilization of aerial manipulators for performing pushing tasks in non-destructive testing (NDT) applications has seen significant growth. Such operations entail physical interactions between the aerial robotic system and the environment. End-effectors with multiple contact points are…

Cited by 6Source ↗Scholar ↗
2023

Design and Control of a Micro Overactuated Aerial Robot with an Origami Delta Manipulator

Eugenio Cuniato, Christian Geckeler, Maximilian Brunner, Dario Strübin, Elia Bähler, Fabian Ospelt +3
ICRA 2023poster

This work presents the mechanical design and control of a novel small-size and lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) for aerial manipulation. To our knowledge, with a total take-off mass of only 2.0 kg, the proposed system is the most lightweight Aerial Manipulator (AM) that has 8-DOF independently…

Cited by 8Source ↗Scholar ↗
2023

Learning to Open Doors with an Aerial Manipulator

Eugenio Cuniato, Ismail Geles, Weixuan Zhang, Olov Andersson, Marco Tognon, Roland Siegwart
IROS 2023poster

The field of aerial manipulation has seen rapid advances, transitioning from push-and-slide tasks to interaction with articulated objects. The motion trajectory of these complex actions is usually hand-crafted or a result of online optimization methods like Model Predictive Control (MPC) or Model Pr…

Cited by 4Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

A Planning-and-Control Framework for Aerial Manipulation of Articulated Objects

Maximilian Brunner, Giuseppe Rizzi, Matthias Studiger, Roland Siegwart, Marco Tognon
RA-L 2022

While the variety of applications for Aerial Manipulators (AMs) has increased over the last years, they are mostly limited to push-and-slide tasks. More complex manipulations of dynamic environments are poorly addressed and still require handcrafted designs of hardware, control, and trajectory plann

Cited by 45Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Adaptive Tank-based Control for Aerial Physical Interaction with Uncertain Dynamic Environments Using Energy-Task Estimation

Federico Benzi, Maximilian Brunner, Marco Tognon, Cristian Secchi, Roland Siegwart
RA-L 2022

While aerial manipulation has witnessed noticeable growth as a field in the last decade, most works investigated forms of interaction with static and rigid environments only. Whenever dynamic environments were considered, the employed methods often relied on the knowledge of the model of the environ

Cited by 33Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Aerial Layouting: Design and Control of a Compliant and Actuated End-Effector for Precise In-flight Marking on Ceilings

Christian Lanegger, Marco Ruggia, Marco Tognon, Lionel Ott, Roland Siegwart
RSS 2022poster

Aerial robots have demonstrated impressive feats of precise control, such as dynamic flight through openings or highly complex choreographies. Despite the accuracy needed for these tasks, there are problems that require levels of precision that are challenging to achieve today. One such problem is a…

Cited by 12Source ↗PDF ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Energy Tank-Based Policies for Robust Aerial Physical Interaction with Moving Objects

Maximilian Brunner, Livio Giacomini, Roland Siegwart, Marco Tognon
ICRA 2022poster

Although manipulation capabilities of aerial robots greatly improved in the last decade, only few works addressed the problem of aerial physical interaction with dynamic environments, proposing strongly model-based approaches. However, in real scenarios, modeling the environment with high accuracy i…

Cited by 27Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Human-State-Aware Controller for a Tethered Aerial Robot Guiding a Human by Physical Interaction

Mike Allenspach, Yash Vyas, Matthias Rubio, Roland Siegwart, Marco Tognon
RA-L 2022

With the rapid development of Aerial Physical Interaction, the possibility to have aerial robots physically interacting with humans is attracting a growing interest. In one of our previous works [1], we considered one of the first systems in which a human is physically connected to an aerial vehicle

Cited by 19Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Indirect Force Control of a Cable-Suspended Aerial Multi-Robot Manipulator

Dario Sanalitro, Marco Tognon, Antonio E. Jimenez-Cano, Juan Cortés, Antonio Franchi
RA-L 2022

We present the control in physical interaction with the environment of a Cable-suspended Aerial Multi-Robot Manipulator (CS-AMRM) called the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Fly-Crane</i> , composed of three aerial vehicles towed to a

Cited by 27Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Learning Variable Impedance Control for Aerial Sliding on Uneven Heterogeneous Surfaces by Proprioceptive and Tactile Sensing

Weixuan Zhang, Lionel Ott, Marco Tognon, Roland Siegwart
RA-L 2022

The recent development of novel aerial vehicles capable of physically interacting with the environment leads to new applications such as contact-based inspection. These tasks require the robotic system to exchange forces with partially-known environments, which may contain uncertainties including un

Cited by 28Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Power-Based Safety Layer for Aerial Vehicles in Physical Interaction Using Lyapunov Exponents

Eugenio Cuniato, Nicholas R. J. Lawrance, Marco Tognon, Roland Siegwart
RA-L 2022

As the performance of autonomous systems increases, safety concerns arise, especially when operating in non-structured environments. To deal with these concerns, this work presents a safety layer for mechanical systems that detects and responds to unstable dynamics caused by external disturbances. T

Cited by 22Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Reactive Motion Planning for Rope Manipulation and Collision Avoidance using Aerial Robots

Liping Shi, Michael Pantic, Olov Andersson, Marco Tognon, Roland Siegwart, Rune Hylsberg Jacobsen
IROS 2022poster

In this work we address the challenging problem of manipulating a flexible link, like a rope, with an aerial robot. Inspired by spraying tasks in construction and maintenance scenarios, we consider the case in which an autonomous end-effector (e.g., a spray nozzle moved by a robot or a human operato…

Cited by 6Source ↗Scholar ↗
2022

Towards 6DoF Bilateral Teleoperation of an Omnidirectional Aerial Vehicle for Aerial Physical Interaction

Mike Allenspach, Nicholas Lawrance, Marco Tognon, Roland Siegwart
ICRA 2022poster

Bilateral teleoperation offers an intriguing solution towards shared autonomy with aerial vehicles in contact-based inspection and manipulation tasks. Omnidirectional aerial robots allow for full pose operations, making them particularly attractive in such tasks. Naturally, the question arises wheth…

Cited by 17Source ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Active Model Learning using Informative Trajectories for Improved Closed-Loop Control on Real Robots

Weixuan Zhang, Marco Tognon, Lionel Ott, Roland Siegwart, Juan Nieto
ICRA 2021poster

Model-based controllers on real robots require accurate knowledge of the system dynamics to perform optimally. For complex dynamics, first-principles modeling is not sufficiently precise, and data-driven approaches can be leveraged to learn a statistical model from real experiments. However, the eff…

Cited by 11Source ↗Scholar ↗
2021

Direct Force and Pose NMPC with Multiple Interaction Modes for Aerial Push-and-Slide Operations

Lazar Peric, Maximilian Brunner, Karen Bodie, Marco Tognon, Roland Siegwart
ICRA 2021poster

In this paper, we present a model predictive controller for a fully actuated aerial manipulator to track a hybrid force and pose trajectory at the end-effector in an aerial interaction task. A force sensor at the end-effector is used to detect contact and to directly control the interaction force. W…

Cited by 29Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Direct Force Feedback Control and Online Multi-Task Optimization for Aerial Manipulators

Gabriele Nava, Quentin Sablé, Marco Tognon, Daniele Pucci, Antonio Franchi
RA-L 2020

In this letter we present an optimization-based method for controlling aerial manipulators in physical contact with the environment. The multi-task control problem, which includes hybrid force-motion tasks, energetic tasks, and position/postural tasks, is recast as a quadratic programming problem wi

Cited by 75Source ↗Scholar ↗
2020

Full-Pose Manipulation Control of a Cable-Suspended Load With Multiple UAVs Under Uncertainties

Dario Sanalitro, Heitor Judiss Savino, Marco Tognon, Juan Cortés, Antonio Franchi
RA-L 2020

In this work we propose an uncertainty-aware controller for the Fly-crane system, a statically rigid cable-suspended aerial manipulator using the minimum number of aerial robots and cables. The force closure property of the Fly-crane makes it ideal for applications where high precision is required a

Cited by 73Source ↗Scholar ↗
2019

A Truly-Redundant Aerial Manipulator System With Application to Push-and-Slide Inspection in Industrial Plants

Marco Tognon, Hermes Amadeus Tello Chavez, Enrico Gasparin, Quentin Sablé, Davide Bicego, Anthony Mallet +5
RA-L 2019

We present the design, motion planning, and control of an aerial manipulator for non-trivial physical interaction tasks, such as pushing while sliding on curved surfaces-a task which is motivated by the increasing interest in autonomous non-destructive tests for industrial plants. The proposed aeria

Cited by 174Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Aerial Co-Manipulation With Cables: The Role of Internal Force for Equilibria, Stability, and Passivity

Marco Tognon, Chiara Gabellieri, Lucia Pallottino, Antonio Franchi
RA-L 2018

This letter considers the cooperative manipulation of a cable-suspended load with two generic aerial robots without the need of explicit communication. The role of the internal force for the asymptotic stability of the beam position-and-attitude equilibria is analyzed in depth. Using a nonlinear Lya

Cited by 93Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Control-Aware Motion Planning for Task-Constrained Aerial Manipulation

Marco Tognon, Elisabetta Cataldi, Hermes Amadeus Tello Chavez, Gianluca Antonelli, Juan Cortés, Antonio Franchi
RA-L 2018

This letter presents a new method to address the problem of task-constrained motion planning for aerial manipulators. We propose a control-aware planner based on the paradigm of tight coupling between planning and control. Such paradigm is especially useful in aerial manipulation, where the separati

Cited by 47Source ↗Scholar ↗
2018

Omnidirectional Aerial Vehicles With Unidirectional Thrusters: Theory, Optimal Design, and Control

Marco Tognon, Antonio Franchi
RA-L 2018

This letter presents a theoretical study on omnidirectional aerial vehicles with body-frame fixed unidirectional thrusters. Omniplus multirotor designs are defined as the ones that allow to exert a total wrench in any direction using positive-only lift force and drag moment (i.e., positive rotationa

Cited by 77Source ↗Scholar ↗
2017

Dynamic decentralized control for protocentric aerial manipulators

Marco Tognon, Burak Yüksel, Gabriele Buondonno, Antonio Franchi
ICRA 2017poster

We present a control methodology for underactuated aerial manipulators that is both easy to implement on real systems and able to achieve highly dynamic behaviors. The method is composed by two parts: i) a nominal input/state trajectory generator that takes into account the full-body dynamics of the…

Cited by 59Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Observer-Based Control of Position and Tension for an Aerial Robot Tethered to a Moving Platform

Marco Tognon, Sanket S. Dash, Antonio Franchi
RA-L 2016

In this letter, we address a challenging version of the problem of controlling tethered aerial vehicles (also known as UAV, MAV, and UAS) by considering the aerial robot linked to a generic and independently moving platform. We solve the exact tracking control problem for both the 3-D position of th

Cited by 25Source ↗Scholar ↗
2016

Takeoff and landing on slopes via inclined hovering with a tethered aerial robot

Marco Tognon, Andrea Testa, Enrica Rossi, Antonio Franchi
IROS 2016poster

In this paper we face the challenging problem of takeoff and landing on sloped surfaces for a VTOL aerial vehicle. We define the general conditions for a safe and robust maneuver and we analyze and compare two classes of methods to fulfill these conditions: free-flight vs. passively-tethered. Focusi…

Cited by 32Source ↗Scholar ↗
2015

Nonlinear observer-based tracking control of link stress and elevation for a tethered aerial robot using inertial-only measurements

Marco Tognon, Antonio Franchi
ICRA 2015poster

This work deals with a comprehensive version of the tethered aerial vehicle problem including all the three possible link cases: cable, strut, and bar. We prove the dynamic feedback linearizability and differential flatness of the system with respect to the elevation of the vehicle and the stress ap…

Cited by 29Source ↗Scholar ↗