10 accepted papers
Autonomous flight through unknown environments in the presence of obstacles is a challenging problem for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). A majority of the current state-of-art research assumes obstacles as opaque objects that can be easily sensed by optical sensors such as cameras or LiDARs. However i…
In this paper we describe the Open Vision Computer (OVC) which was designed to support high speed, vision guided autonomous drone flight. In particular our aim was to develop a system that would be suitable for relatively small-scale flying platforms where size, weight, power consumption and computa…
High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small as possible. Aerial robots add a limitation of payload capaci…
One of the main challenges in robot swarming arises from the need to design controllers that guarantee safety and motion planners that guarantee collision avoidance. This translates into sensors that measure proximity to neighbors and algorithms that scale exponentially with the number of robots. In
In recent years, vision-aided inertial odometry for state estimation has matured significantly. However, we still encounter challenges in terms of improving the computational efficiency and robustness of the underlying algorithms for applications in autonomous flight with microaerial vehicles, in wh
In the last decade, consumer electronic devices such as smartphones, are packaged with small cameras, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, all sensors allowing autonomous deployment of aerial robots in GPS-denied environments. Our previous work [1], demonstrated the feasibility of using smartphones for a…
The agility and ease of control make a quadrotor aircraft an attractive platform for studying swarm behavior, modeling, and control. The energetics of sustained flight for small aircraft, however, limit typical applications to only a few minutes. Adding payloads - and the mechanisms used to manipula
In the last decade, multi-rotor Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have attracted great attention from robotics researchers. Offering affordable agility and maneuverability, multi-rotor aircrafts have become the most commonly used platforms for robotics applications. Amongst the most promising application…
Scaling down the size and mass of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) increases their agility and their ability to operate in tight formations. In addition, smaller robots are safer and, as we will show in this paper, more robust to collisions. This paper addresses the development of a pico quadrotor measu…
Consumer grade technology seen in cameras and phones has led to the price/performance ratio of sensors and processors falling dramatically over the last decade. In particular, most devices are packaged with a camera, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer, important sensors for aerial robotics. The low m…