Publications associées à Vision-based control of near-obstacle flight

Accurate and agile flight with winged drones

Drones hold promise to assist in civilian tasks. To realize this application, future drones must operate within large cities, covering large distances while navigating within cluttered urban landscapes. The increased efficiency of winged drones over rotary ...

EPFL2024

VDM-based navigation for Delta-wing UAVs: Models, calibration, implementation

Pasquale Longobardi

Autonomous navigation of small UAVs is typically based on the integration of inertial navigation systems (INS) together with global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). However, GNSS signals can face various forms of interference affecting their continuous ...

EPFL2024

Aerodynamic modeling of a delta-wing UAV for model-based navigation

Jan Skaloud, Pasquale Longobardi

This study aims to identify an optimal, as well as practical, parametric structure for a delta-wing UAV aerodynamic model for the purpose of model-based navigation. We present a comprehensive procedure for characterizing the aerodynamics of this platform, ...

2024

Airborne sensor fusion: Expected accuracy and behavior of a concurrent adjustment

Jan Skaloud, Davide Antonio Cucci, Aurélien Arnaud Brun, Kyriaki Mouzakidou

Tightly-coupled sensor orientation, i.e. the simultaneous processing of temporal (GNSS and raw inertial) and spatial (image and lidar) constraints in a common adjustment, has demonstrated significant improvement in the quality of attitude determination wit ...

2024

Lumped Drag Model Identification and Real-Time External Force Detection for Rotary-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

Alcherio Martinoli, Lucas Cédric Wälti

This work focuses on understanding and identifying the drag forces applied to a rotary-wing Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV). We propose a lumped drag model that concisely describes the aerodynamical forces the MAV is subject to, with a minimal set of parameters ...

IEEE2024

Distributed Predictive Formation Control of Autonomous Rotary-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

Izzet Kagan Erünsal

This doctoral thesis navigates the complex landscape of motion coordination and formation control within teams of rotary-wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Prompted by the intricate demands of real-world applications such as search and rescue or surveillan ...

EPFL2024

An Ultralow-Power Triaxial MEMS Accelerometer With High-Voltage Biasing and Electrostatic Mismatch Compensation

Yimai Peng, Li Xu, Kyojin Choo

This article presents a triaxial micro electromechani-cal system (MEMS) capacitive accelerometer using a high-voltage biasing technique to achieve high resolution with ultralow power. The accelerometer system generates a differential pair of high voltages ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

VDMNav: Software Architecture for Aerodynamically Constrained Navigation on Small Fixed-Wing Drones

Jan Skaloud, Gabriel François Laupré

Navigation of drones is predominantly based on sensor fusion algorithms. Most of these algorithms make use of some form of Bayesian filtering with a majority employing an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), wherein inertial measurements are fused with a Global N ...

2024

Gas Sensing with Rotary-Wing Nano Aerial Vehicles

Chiara Ercolani

Harmful chemical compounds are released daily in warehouses, chemical plants and during environmental emergencies. Their uncontrolled dispersion contributes to the pollution of the atmosphere and threatens human and animal lives. When gas leaks occur, the ...

EPFL2024

Visual complexity of urban streetscapes: human vs computer vision

Pietro Florio

Understanding visual complexity of urban environments may improve urban design strategies and limit visual pollution due to advertising, road signage, telecommunication systems and machinery. This paper aims at quantifying visual complexity specifically in ...

Springer2024

Less Conservatism, Stronger Robustness: Iterative Robust Gain-Scheduled Path Following Control of Autonomous Bus With Unstructured and Changing Dynamics

Denis Gillet, Jianwei Li, Man Shi

Path-following control is a critical technology for autonomous vehicles. However, time-varying parameters, parametric uncertainties, external disturbances, and complicated environments significantly challenge autonomous driving. We propose an iterative rob ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Heading for the Abyss: Control Strategies for Exploiting Swinging of a Descending Tethered Aerial Robot

Frank Centamori, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Max Mirko Polzin

The use of aerial vehicles for exploration and data collection has the potential to significantly aid environmental monitoring in environments which are dangerous and hard to navigate. However, within these environments navigation can often be restricted b ...

2023

Identifying aerodynamics of small fixed-wing drones using inertial measurements for model-based navigation

Jan Skaloud, Gabriel François Laupré

The success of drone missions is incumbent on an accurate determination of the drone pose and velocity, which are collectively estimated by fusing iner- tial measurement unit and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) mea- surements. However, during a G ...

2023

The effects of kinematics, flexibility, and planform on the vortex formation and aerodynamic performance of flapping wing flight

Alexander Gehrke

In this thesis, the aerodynamic challenges in flapping wing flight are addressed. In particular, the effects of different wing kinematics, flexibilities, and planforms on the the leading edge vortex development and aerodynamic performance are investigated. ...

EPFL2023

swissALPS: a Dataset for Imbalanced Land Cover Mapping in Alpine Regions

Valérie Zermatten

Our dataset consists of very high-resolution aerial images (50cm) and a digital elevation model (50cm) that covers approx. 2300 km2 of land above 2000m altitude in the southwestern part of Switzerland. Our land cover labels focus on alpine land cover that ...

IEEE DataPort2023

Model-based constraints for trajectory determination of quad-copters: Design, calibration & merits for direct orientation

Jan Skaloud, Davide Antonio Cucci, Kenneth Joseph Paul

This paper proposes a novel method to improve georeferencing of airborne laser scanning by improved trajectory estimation using Vehicle Dynamic Model. In Vehicle Dynamic Model (VDM), the relationship between the dynamics of the platform and control inputs ...

2023

Training Efficient Controllers via Analytic Policy Gradient

Dario Floreano, Davide Scaramuzza, Valentin Wüest

Control design for robotic systems is complex and often requires solving an optimization to follow a trajectory accurately. Online optimization approaches like Model Predictive Control (MPC) have been shown to achieve great tracking performance, but requir ...

New York2023

Wing and tail morphing in birds and drones

Enrico Ajanic

To aid humans in civilian tasks, future drones will have to operate in large cities that abound with difficult flight conditions such as confined spaces, obstacles, and turbulent air. Such drones must cruise efficiently to cover vast distances fast and als ...

EPFL2023

1(st) Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023: Challenge Results

Alexandre Massoud Alahi, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, Alexandre Bernardino, Yang Song, Siddharth Gupta

The 1st Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2023 focused on maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), and organized several subchallenges in this domain: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Detection ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2023

Stay close, but not too close: aerial image analysis reveals patterns of social distancing in seal colonies

Devis Tuia, Benjamin Alexander Kellenberger

Many species aggregate in dense colonies. Species-specific spatial patterns provide clues about how colonies are shaped by various (a)biotic factors, including predation, temperature regulation or disease transmission. Using aerial imagery, we examined the ...

2023