Risk-Aware Decentralized Multi-MAV Planning in Unknown and Dynamic Environments

Recent progress in multiple micro aerial vehicle (MAV) systems has demonstrated autonomous navigation in static environments. Yet, there are limited works regarding the autonomous navigation of multiple MAVs in dynamic and unknown environments. The challenge arises from the complexity of the motion planning problem, which requires the MAVs to...

Probabilistic Motion Planning for Multi-Robot Systems

Planning safe motions for multi-robot systems is crucial for deploying them in real-world applications such as target tracking, environmental monitoring, and multi-view cinematography. Traditional approaches mainly solve the multi-robot motion planning problem in a deterministic manner, where the robot states and system models are perfectly...

Autonomous Swarms of Tiny Flying Robots

In the last decade, the research field of aerial swarms has grown at a rapid pace. These multi-robot systems possess desirable abilities including mobility in 3D spaces, efficient task execution in parallel, and redundant characteristics for fault tolerance. Many applications with multiple flying robots have already been demonstrated, such as...

Online trajectory planning and control of a MAV payload system in dynamic environments

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) can be used for aerial transportation in remote and urban spaces where portability can be exploited to reach previously inaccessible and inhospitable spaces. Current approaches for path planning of MAV swung payload system either compute conservative minimal-swing trajectories or pre-generate agile collision-free...

Position control of a quadrotor MAV while compensating for discrete jumps in the pose estimate

The trajectory tracking efficiency of a quadrotor Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) position controller is decreased by discrete jumps in the pose estimate provided by a localization algorithm. This paper presents a solution to this problem by first introducing a new quadrotor MAV position control architecture followed by two methods that can...

Indoor swarm exploration with Pocket Drones

Pocket drones, weighing less than 50 grams, are small, agile and inherently safe. This makes them suitable for several surveillance tasks such as search and rescue, green-house monitoring and pipe-line inspection. In order for a more efficient search, a swarm of pocket drones would be ideal to explore these types of areas faster. Current methods...

Real-time Vision-based Autonomous Navigation of MAV in Dynamic Environments

Safe navigation in unknown environments is a challenging task for autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) systems. Previous works generally avoid obstacles by assuming that the environment is static. The purpose of this thesis work is to develop a MAV system that can navigate autonomously and safely in dynamic environments. We present an onboard...

Monocular Optical Flow based Attitude Estimation in Micro Aerial Vehicles: A Bio-Inspired Approach

The exceptional flight capabilities of insects have long amazed and inspired researchers and roboticists striving to make Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) smaller and more agile. It is well known that optical flow plays a prominent role in insect flight control and navigation, and hence it is being increasingly investigated for applications in...

An Empirical Approach to Reinforcement Learning for Micro Aerial Vehicles

The use of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in practical applications, to solve real-world problems, is growing in demand as the technology becomes more widely known and accessible. Proposed applications already span a wide berth of fields like military, search and rescue, ecology, artificial pollinators, and more. As compared to larger Unmanned...

Flight control and collision avoidance for quadcopter and flapping wing MAVs using only optical flow: Theory, Simulation and Experiment

Both quadcopter Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) and Flapping Wing MAVs (FWMAVs) are constrained in Size, Weight and Processing power (SWaP) in order to achieve flight tasks that include attitude and velocity stabilisation, as well as obstacle avoidance. <br/>Conventional sensory and control approaches, such as those relying on inertial, visual and...

Online Trajectory Planning and Control of a MAV Payload System in Dynamic Environments: A Non-Linear Model Predictive Control Approach

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are increasingly being used for aerial transportation in remote and urban spaces where portability can be exploited to reach previously inaccessible and inhospitable spaces. Current approaches to MAV swung payload system path planning have primarily focused on pre-generating (agile) collision-free, or conservative...

Identification of time-varying models for flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles

The demand for always smaller, more manoeuvrable and versatile unmanned aerial vehicles cannot be met with conventional manned flight approaches. This has led engineers to seek inspiration in nature, giving rise to the bio-inspired flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV). FWMAVs achieve a remarkable flight performance at small scales, however...

Low-memory Visual Route Following for Micro Aerial Vehicles in Indoor Environments

This thesis presents a visual route following method that minimizes memory consumption to the point that even Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) equipped with only a simple microcontroller can traverse distances of a few hundred meters. Existing Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms are too complex for use on a microcontroller....

Model identification of a flapping wing micro aerial vehicle

Different flapping wing micro aerial vehicles (FWMAV) have been developed for academic (Harvard’s RoboBee), military (Israel Aerospace Industries’ Butterfly) and technology demonstration (Aerovironment’s NanoHummingBird) purposes. Among these, theDelFly II is recognized as one of themost successful configurations of FWMAV, with a broad flight...

The Exploring DelFly: How to increase the indoor explored area of the DelFly Explorer by means of computationally efficient routing decisions?

Small robots, such as Micro Aerial Vehicles, form an increasingly popular field of interests in research, industry and the consumer market. The autonomous capabilities of these systems keep evolving and one of the main research goals is to reach full autonomy. However, this is often achieved at the cost of growing hardware demands. In this study...

Off-board Visual Odometry and Control of an Ultralight Quadrotor MAV

In this paper, we propose an approach to autonomously control a quadrotor micro aerial vehicle (MAV). With take-off weight of 50 g and 8-min flight endurance, the MAV platform codenamed ‘KayLion’ developed by the National University of Singapore (NUS) is able to perform autonomous flight with pre-planned path tracking. The vision-based...

Behaviour Trees for Evolutionary Robotics: Reducing the Reality Gap

Evolutionary Robotics allows robots with limited sensors and processing to tackle complex tasks by means of sensory-motor coordination. In this paper we show the first application of the Behaviour Tree framework to a real robotic platform using the Evolutionary Robotics methodology. This framework is used to improve the intelligibility of the...