19 accepted papers
This paper proposes a novel nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) based dual quaternion dynamics modeling and control framework for a drone with a cable-suspended load. Leveraging dual quaternions, a compact and singularity-free mathematical representation, we derive a unified dynamic model that capt…
In the evolving landscape of high-speed agile quadrotor flight, achieving precise trajectory tracking at the platform’s operational limits is paramount. Controllers must handle actuator constraints, exhibit robustness to disturbances, and remain computationally efficient for safety-critical applicat
This paper presents a method to compute differentiable collision-free parametric corridors. In contrast to existing solutions that decompose the obstacle-free space into multiple convex sets, the continuous corridors computed by our method are smooth and differentiable, making them compatible with e…
Modeling the kinematics and dynamics of robotics systems with suspended loads using dual quaternions has not been explored so far. This paper introduces a new innovative control strategy using dual quaternions for UAVs with cable-suspended loads, focusing on the sling load lifting and tracking probl…
This work focuses on the agile transportation of liquids with robotic manipulators. In contrast to existing methods that are either computationally heavy, system/container specific or dependant on a singularity-prone pendulum model, we present a real-time slosh-free tracking technique. This method s…
"f igure.pdf Figure 1: Relationships [width=]figures/hero detected by our method on an unseen image. The top relationships by confidence score are shown. Photo by Spacejoy on Unsplash. Visual relationship detection aims to identify objects and their relationships in images. Prior methods approach th…
Model Predictive Control (MPC) has become a popular framework in embedded control for high-performance autonomous systems. However, to achieve good control performance using MPC, an accurate dynamics model is key. To maintain real-time operation, the dynamics models used on embedded systems have bee
Anticipating the motion of all humans in dynamic environments such as homes and offices is critical to enable safe and effective robot navigation. Such spaces remain challenging as humans do not follow strict rules of motion and there are often multiple occluded entry points such as corners and door
This work focuses on spatial time-optimal motion planning, a generalization of the exact time-optimal path following problem that allows a system to plan within a predefined space. In contrast to state-of-the-art methods, we drop the assumption of a given collision-free geometric reference. Instead,…
Autonomous systems and humans are increasingly sharing the same space. Robots work side by side or even hand in hand with humans to balance each other's limitations. Such cooperative interactions are ever more sophisticated. Thus, the ability to reason not just about a human's center of gravity posi…
We present SMORS, the first Soft fully actuated MultirOtoR System for multimodal locomotion. Unlike conventional hexarotors, SMORS is equipped with three rigid and three continuously soft arms, with each arm hosting a propeller. We create a bridge between the fields of soft and aerial robotics by me…
Minimum-time navigation within constrained and dynamic environments is of special relevance in robotics. Seeking time-optimality, while guaranteeing the integrity of time-varying spatial bounds, is an appealing trade-off for agile vehicles, such as quadrotors. State-of-the-art approaches, either ass…
There has been a considerable amount of recent work on high-speed micro-aerial vehicle flight in unknown and unstructured environments. Generally these approaches either use active sensing or fly slowly enough to ensure a safe braking distance with the relatively short sensing range of passive senso…
There has been considerable recent work in motion planning for UAVs to enable aggressive, highly dynamic flight in known environments with motion capture systems. However, these existing planners have not been shown to enable the same kind of flight in unknown, outdoor environments. In this paper we…
In this paper, we consider a non-conventional hexarotor whose propellers can be simultaneously tilted about two orthogonal axes: in this way, its underactuation degree can be easily adapted to the task at hand. For a given tilt profile, the minimum-energy trajectory between two prescribed boundary s…
This paper presents the design, control, and experimental validation of a novel fully-actuated aerial robot for physically interactive tasks, named Tilt-Hex. We show how the Tilt-Hex, a tilted-propeller hexarotor is able to control the full pose (position and orientation independently) using a geome…
Standard hexarotors are often mistakenly considered `by definition' fail-safe multi-rotor platforms because of the two additional propellers when compared to quadrotors. However this is not true, in fact, a standard hexarotor cannot statically hover with `only' five propellers. In this paper we prov…
We present FAST-Hex, a novel UAV concept which is able to smoothly change its configuration from underactuated to fully actuated by using only one additional motor that tilts all propellers at the same time. FAST-Hex can adapt to the task at hand by finely tuning its configuration from the efficient…
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…