Mapping the Flood Vulnerability of Residential Structures: Cases from The Netherlands, Puerto Rico, and the United States

Floods are consistently ranked as the most financially devastating natural disasters worldwide. Recent flood events in the Netherlands, Caribbean, and US have drawn attention to flood risks resulting from pluvial and fluvial sources. Despite shared experiences with flooding, these regions employ distinct approaches and flood management...

Evolving Spiking Neural Networks to Mimic PID Control: Applied to Autonomous Blimps

In recent years, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have become a standard in robotic control. However, a significant drawback of large-scale ANNs is their increased power consumption. This becomes a critical concern when designing autonomous aerial vehicles, given the stringent constraints on power and weight. Especially in the case of blimps,...

Continuous Occupancy Mapping in Dynamic Environments Using Particles

Particle-based dynamic occupancy maps were proposed in recent years to model the obstacles in dynamic environments. Current particle-based maps describe the occupancy status in discrete grid form and suffer from the grid size problem, wherein a large grid size is unfavorable for motion planning while a small grid size lowers efficiency and...

RAST: Risk-Aware Spatio-Temporal Safety Corridors for MAV Navigation in Dynamic Uncertain Environments

Autonomous navigation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in dynamic and unknown environments is a complex and challenging task. Current works rely on assumptions to solve the problem. The MAV's pose is precisely known, the dynamic obstacles can be explicitly segmented from static ones, their number is known and fixed, or they can be modeled with...

Stereo Visual Inertial Odometry for Robots with Limited Computational Resources*

Current existing stereo visual odometry algorithms are computationally too expensive for robots with restricted resources. Executing these algorithms on such robots leads to a low frame rate and unacceptable decay in accuracy. We modify S-MSCKF, one of the most computationally efficient stereo Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) algorithm, to improve...

A Computationally Efficient Moving Horizon Estimator for Ultra-Wideband Localization on Small Quadrotors

We present a computationally efficient moving horizon estimator that allows for real-time localization using Ultra-Wideband measurements on small quadrotors. The estimator uses only a single iteration of a simple gradient descent method to optimize the state estimate based on past measurements, while using random sample consensus to reject...

Hermes - Wind Energy Harvesting Wireless System for Sensing AoA and Wind Speed

In this letter, we present Hermes - a novel, low-cost, wireless, batteryless, energy harvesting system for aerial vehicles for sensing wind speed and Angle of Attack (AoA) concurrently. Hermes comprises a set of piezoelectric films which flutter due to incoming wind and the characteristics of this aeroelastic flutter are utilized for...

Evolved Neuromorphic Control for High Speed Divergence-Based Landings of MAVs

Flying insects are capable of vision-based navigation in cluttered environments, reliably avoiding obstacles through fast and agile maneuvers, while being very efficient in the processing of visual stimuli. Meanwhile, autonomous micro air vehicles still lag far behind their biological counterparts, displaying inferior performance at a much...

Unsupervised Tuning of Filter Parameters Without Ground-Truth Applied to Aerial Robots

Autonomous robots heavily rely on well-tuned state estimation filters for successful control. This letter presents a novel automatic tuning strategy for learning filter parameters by minimizing the innovation, i.e., the discrepancy between expected and received signals from all sensors. The optimization process only requires the inputs and...

Decision-making for unmanned aerial vehicle operation in icing conditions

With the increased use of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for civil and commercial applications, there is a strong demand for new regulations and technology that will eventually permit for the integration of UAS in unsegregated airspace. This requires new technology to ensure sufficient safety and a smooth integration process. The absence of a...