14 accepted papers
We present a hierarchical whole-body controller leveraging the full rigid body dynamics of the wheeled bipedal robot Ascento. We derive closed-form expressions for the dynamics of its kinematic loops in a way that readily generalizes to more complex systems. The rolling constraint is incorporated us
Overactuated omnidirectional flying vehicles are capable of generating force and torque in any direction, which is important for applications such as contact-based industrial inspection. This comes at the price of an increase in model complexity. These vehicles usually have non-negligible, repetitiv
This work presents a method to control omnidirectional micro aerial vehicles (OMAVs) for the tracking of 6-DoF trajectories in free space. A rigid body model based approach is applied in a receding horizon fashion to generate optimal wrench commands that can be constrained to meet limits given by th…
Driven by the promise of leveraging the benefits of collaborative robot operation, this paper presents an approach to estimate the relative transformation between two small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), each equipped with a single camera and an inertial sensor, comprising the first step of any me…
Unmanned blimps are a safe and reliable alternative to conventional drones when flying above people. On-board real-time tracking of their pose and velocities is a necessary step toward autonomous navigation. There is a need for an easily deployable technology that is able to accurately and robustly
This letter describes a system for autonomous spray painting using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), suitable for industrial applications. The work is motivated by the potential for such a system to achieve accurate and fast painting results. The PaintCopter is a quadrotor that has been custom fitte
Autonomous delivery of goods using a Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) is a difficult problem, as it poses high demand on the MAV's control, perception and manipulation capabilities. This problem is especially challenging if the exact shape, location and configuration of the objects are unknown. In this paper…
This paper shows a strategy based on passive force control for collaborative object transportation using Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), focusing on the transportation of a bulky object by two hexacopters. The goal is to develop a robust approach which does not rely on: (a) communication links between…
When several Multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) share the same airspace, reliable and robust collision avoidance is required. In this paper we address the problem of multi-MAV reactive collision avoidance. We employ a model-based controller to simultaneously track a reference trajectory and avo…
In this paper, the design, modeling and experimental verification of a large workspace, parallel aerial manipulator is presented. The proposed manipulator has 3 Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) and enables physical interaction on the sides, as well as below the aerial robot. The design parameters of the ma…
This paper presents a framework for real-time, full-state feedback, unconstrained, nonlinear model predictive control that combines trajectory optimization and tracking control in a single, unified approach. The proposed method uses an iterative optimal control algorithm, namely Sequential Linear Qu
With robotic systems reaching considerable maturity in basic self-localization and environment mapping, new research avenues open up pushing for interaction of a robot with its surroundings for added autonomy. However, the transition from traditionally sparse feature-based maps to dense and accurate…
This paper presents a novel path planning algorithm for the autonomous exploration of unknown space using aerial robotic platforms. The proposed planner employs a receding horizon “next-best-view” scheme: In an online computed random tree it finds the best branch, the quality of which is determined
We present an aerial robotic platform for remote tree cavity inspection, based on a hexacopter Micro-Aerial vehicle (MAV) equipped with a dexterous manipulator. The goal is to make the inspection process safer and more efficient and facilitate data collection about tree cavities, which are important…