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Bai, Chengchao (author), Yan, Peng (author), Piao, Haiyin (author), Pan, W. (author), Guo, Jifeng (author)This article explores deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for the flocking control of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms. The flocking control policy is trained using a centralized-learning-decentralized-execution (CTDE) paradigm, where a centralized critic network augmented with additional information about the entire UAV swarm is utilized...journal article 2024
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Chen, Siyuan (author), Laefer, Debra F. (author), Zeng, Xiangding (author), Truong-Hong, Linh (author), Mangina, Eleni (author)Road networks are essential elements of a community's infrastructure and need regular inspection. Present practice requires traffic interruptions and safety risks for inspectors. The road detection system based on vehicle-mounted lasers is also quite mature, offering advantages such as high-precision defect detection, high automation, and...journal article 2024
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Samboko, H.T. (author)The unavailability of consistent accurate river flow data is a significant impediment to understanding water resources availability, and hydrological extremes. This is particularly true for remote, difficult to access, morphologically active and therefore rapidly changing rivers. The state of global river discharge monitoring with respect to...doctoral thesis 2023
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Anil Meera, A. (author)The potential impact of a grand unified theory of the brain on the robotics community might be immense, as it might hold the key to the general artificial intelligence. Such a theory might make revolutionary leaps in robot intelligence by improving the quality of our lives. The last two decades have witnessed the rise of one such brain theory -...doctoral thesis 2023
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Hou, Yueqi (author), Liang, Xiaolong (author), Lv, Maolong (author), Yang, Q. (author), Li, Y. (author)Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) maneuver strategy learning remains a challenge when using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in this sparse reward task. In this paper, we propose Subtask-Masked curriculum learning for RL (SUBMAS-RL), an efficient RL paradigm that implements curriculum learning and knowledge transfer for UAV maneuver scenarios...journal article 2023
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Wang, X. (author), Baldi, S. (author), Feng, Xuewei (author), Wu, Changwei (author), Xie, Hongwei (author), De Schutter, B.H.K. (author)The vector field method was originally proposed to guide a single fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) towards a desired path. In this work, a non-uniform vector field method is proposed that changes in both magnitude and direction, for the purpose of achieving formations of UAVs. As compared to related work in the literature, the...journal article 2023
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King, Andrew J. (author), Portugal, Steven J. (author), Strömbom, Daniel (author), Mann, Richard P. (author), Carrillo, José A. (author), Kalise, Dante (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author), Barnett, Heather (author), Scerri, Paul (author)A single sheepdog can bring together and manoeuvre hundreds of sheep from one location to another. Engineers and ecologists are fascinated by this sheepdog herding because of the potential it provides for ‘bio-herding’: a biologically inspired herding of animal groups by robots. Although many herding algorithms have been proposed, most are...journal article 2023
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Nguyen, Kiet Tuan (author), Phan, Anh Thu Thi (author), Truong-Hong, Linh (author)Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are commonly utilized as cost-effective devices for data collection by capturing photos of target objects. UAV images have been used for many applications, such as civil engineering, transportation, architecture, surveying, and mapping. Although commercial UAV image data processing software is suitable for...conference paper 2023
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Rowntree, Timon (author)For future operations of unmanned aviation, even higher traffic densities than previously seen in manned aviation are expected. Previous work has shown that a vertically layered airspace design performs best at improving safety metrics such as the total number of conflicts and Losses of Separation (LoSs). Furthermore, it has been shown that...master thesis 2022
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Vossen, Pippa (author)In this research, a sustainability and cost assessment of battery health management strategies applied to Lithium batteries of an electric Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (eUAV) is performed. A mission-based strategy is proposed with the aim to elongate battery lifetime. With this strategy, the battery is charged to the estimated State of Charge (SOC)...master thesis 2022
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Zhang, Boyang (author), Sun, Xiuxia (author), Lv, Maolong (author), Liu, Shuguang (author), Li, Le (author)In contrast with most existing results concerning unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) wherein material points or only attitude/longitudinal dynamics are considered, this article proposes a distributed fixed-time fault-tolerant control methodology for networked fixed-wing UAVs whose dynamics are six-degree-of-freedom with twelf-state-variables...journal article 2022
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Zhang, Boyang (author), Sun, Xiuxia (author), Lv, Maolong (author), Liu, Shuguang (author)Compared with most existing results concerning unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) wherein two-degree or only attitude/longitudinal dynamics are considered, this paper proposes an event-based fault-tolerant coordinated control (FTC) for multiple fixed-wing UAVs such that the consensus tracking of velocity and attitude is achieved in the presence...journal article 2022
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Fu, J. (author), Nunez, Alfredo (author), De Schutter, B.H.K. (author)Natural disasters pose a tremendous risk to the reliability of distribution networks. In this paper, a novel real-time UAV routing strategy for coordination between monitoring and inspection for post-disaster restoration in distribution networks is proposed. With our proposed real-time UAV routing strategy, damages can be inspected by UAVs...journal article 2022
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Dupeyroux, J.J.G. (author), Dinaux, Raoul (author), Wessendorp, Nikhil (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)In this paper, we introduce the Obstacle Detection and Avoidance (ODA) Dataset for Drones, aiming at providing raw data obtained in a real indoor environment with sensors adapted for aerial robotics in the context of obstacle detection and avoidance. Our micro air vehicle (MAV) is equipped with the following sensors: (i) an event-based camera...conference paper 2022
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Sun, Shi (author), Sun, Cheng (author), Duives, D.C. (author), Hoogendoorn, S.P. (author)Pedestrian spaces are increasingly becoming popular locations for shopping, recreation, festivities, and other social activities. Therefore, an improved understanding of the factors that make walking environments enjoyable and safe is essential. Most existing studies focus on modelling walking behaviours of individual pedestrians. However,...journal article 2022
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Wang, X. (author), Roy, Spandan (author), Fari, S. (author), Baldi, S. (author)The high maneuverability of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) exposes these systems to several dynamical and parametric uncertainties, severely affecting the fidelity of modeling and causing limited guidance autonomy. This article shows enhanced autonomy via adaptation mechanisms embedded in the guidance law: a vector-field method is...journal article 2022
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Baldi, S. (author), Sun, Danping (author), Xia, Xin (author), Zhou, Guopeng (author), Liu, Di (author)This article presents an adaptive method for ArduPilot-based autopilots of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ArduPilot is a popular open-source unmanned vehicle software suite. We explore how to augment the PID loops embedded inside ArduPilot with a model-free adaptive control method. The adaptive augmentation, adopted for both...journal article 2022
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Stroobants, S. (author), Dupeyroux, J.J.G. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)Compelling evidence has been given for the high energy efficiency and update rates of neuromorphic processors, with performance beyond what standard Von Neumann architectures can achieve. Such promising features could be advantageous in critical embedded systems, especially in robotics. To date, the constraints inherent in robots (e.g., size...journal article 2022
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Korovilas, Dionisios (author)The medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) plays a key role in both military and civilian applications around the world. However, in a world where electric UAVs are increasingly becoming the norm, the MALE UAV is still primarily powered by hydrocarbon fuels and its design is very much constrained by existing general...master thesis 2021
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Westenberger, Jelle (author)Time-optimal model-predictive control is essential in achieving fast and adaptive quadcopter flight. Due to the limited computational performance of onboard hardware, aggressive flight approaches have relied on off-line trajectory optimization processes or non time-optimal methods. In this work we propose a computational efficient model...master thesis 2021