Vikram Iyer — accepted AI-conference papers

2025

Set Phasers to Stun: Beaming Power and Control to Mobile Robots with Laser Light

Charles J. Carver, Hadleigh Schwartz, Toma Itagaki, Zachary Englhardt, Kechen Liu, Megan Graciela Nauli Manik +4

IROS 2025

We present Phaser, a flexible system that directs narrow-beam laser light to moving robots for concurrent wireless power delivery and communication. We design a semiautomatic calibration procedure to enable fusion of stereo-vision-based 3D robot tracking with high-power beam steering, and a low-powe

Cited by 0 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2023

Toward Sub-Gram Helicopters: Designing a Miniaturized Flybar for Passive Stability

Kyle Johnson, Vicente Arroyos, Raul Villanueva, Adriana Schulz, Sawyer Fuller, Vikram Iyer

IROS 2023poster

Sub-gram flying robots have transformative potential in applications from search and rescue to precision agriculture to environmental monitoring. However, a key gap in achieving autonomous flight for these applications is the low lift to weight ratio of flapping wing and quadrotor designs around 1 g…

Cited by 4 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2022

Towards Sensor Autonomy in Sub-Gram Flying Insect Robots: A Lightweight and Power-Efficient Avionics System

Yash P. Talwekar, Andrew Adie, Vikram Iyer, Sawyer B. Fuller

ICRA 2022poster

Flying insect robots weighing less than a gram (FIRs) have advantages over their larger counterparts due to their low materials cost, small size, and low weight, allowing for deployment in large numbers. Control autonomy in such aircraft introduces challenges arising from their small size such as hi…

Cited by 11 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2021

Toward battery-free flight: Duty cycled recharging of small drones

Nishant Elkunchwar, Suvesha Chandrasekaran, Vikram Iyer, Sawyer B. Fuller

IROS 2021poster

Constrained battery life on current Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) limits the time they can operate and distance they can travel. We address this challenge by harvesting solar power to enable duty-cycled operation on a palm-sized drone. We present a scaling analysis that suggests that more solar…

Cited by 17 Source ↗Scholar ↗

2018

Liftoff of a 190 mg Laser-Powered Aerial Vehicle: The Lightest Wireless Robot to Fly

Johannes James, Vikram Iyer, Yogesh Chukewad, Shyamnath Gollakota, Sawyer B. Fuller

ICRA 2018poster

To date, insect scale aerial robots have required wire tethers for providing power due to the challenges of integrating the required high-voltage power electronics within their severely constrained weight budgets. In this paper we present a significant milestone in the achievement of flight autonomy…

Cited by 147 Source ↗Scholar ↗