8 accepted papers
In the near future, most deployed spacecraft will be autonomous. Their tasks will involve autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations (RPOs) with large structures, such as inspection, assembly, and maintenance of orbiting space stations, as well as human-assistance tasks over shared workspaces. Y…
We present an experimental validation framework for space robotics that leverages underwater environments to approximate microgravity dynamics. While neutral buoyancy conditions make underwater robotics an excellent platform for space robotics validation, there are still dynamical and environmental …
Formation control of multi-agent systems has profound applications in today's technological scene, ranging from satellite constellations, collaborative load transportation, cooperative surveillance, and distributed aperture imaging systems. Often, these applications are needed in environments where
In this paper we analyze the equilibrium points of a collaborative transportation task, composed of two unmanned aerial vehicles and a payload - in this case, a bar. Moreover, centralized and decentralized linear model predictive controllers are designed, where the nonlinear dynamics are linearized…
Cooperative robotics is a trending topic nowadays as it makes possible a number of tasks that cannot be performed by individual robots, such as heavy payload transportation and agile manipulation. In this work, we address the problem of cooperative transportation by heterogeneous, manipulator- endow…
This paper studies the problem of Image-Based Visual Servo Control (IBVS) for quadrotors. Although the control of quadrotors has been extensively studied in the last decades, combining the IBVS module with the quadrotor's dynamics is still hard, mainly due to the under-actuation issues related to th…
We consider a system composed of a bar tethered to two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), where the cables behave as rigid links under tensile forces, and with the control objective of stabilizing the bar's pose around a desired pose. Each UAV is equipped with a PID control law, and we verify that the…
This paper presents the design of a small aerial robot for inhabited microgravity environments, such as orbiting space stations (e.g., ISS). In particular, we target a fleet of robots, called Space CoBots, for collaborative tasks with humans, such as telepresence and cooperative mobile manipulation.…