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Foldable and Self-Deployable Pocket Sized Quadrotor

Publications associées (29)

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

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

Sense in Motion with Belief Clustering: Efficient Gas Source Localization with Mobile Robots

Alcherio Martinoli, Wanting Jin

Given the patchy nature of gas plumes and the slow response of conventional gas sensors, the use of mobile robots for Gas Source Localization (GSL) tasks presents significant challenges. These aspects increase the difficulties in obtaining gas measurements ...

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

A lunar reconnaissance drone for cooperative exploration and high-resolution mapping of extreme locations

Erik Uythoven, Thomas Pfeiffer, Daniel Tataru, David Rodriguez Martinez

An efficient characterization of scientifically significant locations is essential prior to the return of humans to the Moon. The highest resolution imagery acquired from orbit of south-polar shadowed regions and other relevant locations remains, at best, ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

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

Multi-Robot 3D Gas Distribution Mapping: Coordination, Information Sharing and Environmental Knowledge

Alcherio Martinoli, Chiara Ercolani, Thomas Laurent Peeters

Environmental monitoring and mapping operations are an essential tool to combat climate change. An important branch of this domain concerns the construction of reliable gas maps. Adaptive navigation strategies coupled with multi-robot systems improve the o ...

2023

Avian-Inspired Claws Enable Robot Perching or Walking

Dario Floreano, William John Stewart, Won Dong Shin, Mohammad Askari

Multimodal unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rarely capable of more than two modalities, i.e., flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding their operating enve ...

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

Multi-robot task allocation for safe planning against stochastic hazard dynamics

Orcun Karaca, Maryam Kamgarpour

We address multi-robot safe mission planning in uncertain dynamic environments. This problem arises in several applications including safety-critical exploration, surveillance, and emergency rescue missions. Computation of a multi-robot optimal control pol ...

IEEE2023

Crash test-based assessment of injury risks for adults and children when colliding with personal mobility devices and service robots

Aude Billard, Diego Felipe Paez Granados

Autonomous mobility devices such as transport, cleaning, and delivery robots, hold a massive economic and social benefit. However, their deployment should not endanger bystanders, particularly vulnerable populations such as children and older adults who ar ...

Nature Publishing Group2022

VIO-UWB-Based Collaborative Localization and Dense Scene Reconstruction within Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

Fabrizio Schiano

Effective collaboration in multi-robot systems requires accurate and robust estimation of relative localization: from cooperative manipulation to collaborative sensing, and including cooperative exploration or cooperative transportation. This paper introdu ...

IEEE2022

Blind as a Bat: Audible Echolocation on Small Robots

Martin Vetterli, Mihailo Kolundzija, Frederike Dümbgen, Adrien Guillaume Olivier Hoffet, Adam James Scholefield

For safe and efficient operation, mobile robots need to perceive their environment, and in particular, perform tasks such as obstacle detection, localization, and mapping. Although robots are often equipped with microphones and speakers, the audio modality ...

2022

Leveraging Multi-Level Modelling to Automatically Design Behavioral Arbitrators in Robotic Controllers

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann, Hugo Richard Birch

Automatic control design for robotic systems is becoming more and more popular. However, this usually involves a significant computational cost, due to the expensive and noisy evaluation of candidate solutions through highfidelity simulation or even real h ...

2022

Model Predictive Control of Aerial Swarms

Enrica Soria

Aerial robot swarms can have a large socio-economic impact. They can perform time-critical missions faster than a single robot and access dangerous environments without compromising human safety. However, swarm deployment is often limited to free environme ...

EPFL2022

Controlling Maneuverability of a Bio-Inspired Swimming Robot Through Morphological Transformation

Nana Obayashi, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge, Francesco Stella

Biology provides many examples of where body adaption can be used to achieve a change in functionality. The feather star, an underwater crinoid which uses feather arms to locomote and feed, is one such system; it releases its arms to distract prey and vary ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Passive Perching with Energy Storage for Winged Aerial Robots

Dario Floreano, Yegor Piskarev, William John Stewart, Luca Guarino

Perching in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers the possibility of extending the range of aerial robots beyond the limits of their batteries. It has been a topic of intense study for multirotor UAVs. Perching in winged UAVs is harder because a kinetic e ...

2021

Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems for Aquatic Environmental Sensing

Anwar Ahmad Quraishi

Bringing advantages of parallelism and robustness, distributed robotic systems have become an active subject of research since many years. Yet, the progress in that direction with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) has been limited. This project aims at ...

EPFL2021

Safety Concerns Emerging from Robots Navigating in Crowded Pedestrian Areas

Aude Billard, Pericle Salvini, Diego Felipe Paez Granados

The slogan “robots will pervade our environment” has become a reality. Drones and ground robots are used for commercial purposes while semi-autonomous driving systems are standard accessories to traditional cars. However, while our eyes have been riveted o ...

2022

Source Term Estimation Algorithms for Gas Sensing Mobile Robots

Faezeh Rahbar

Localizing sources of airborne chemicals with mobile sensing systems finds applications in various crucial and perilous situations, such as safety and security investigation for detecting explosives or illegal drugs, search and rescue operations to locate ...

EPFL2021

Personalized Body-Machine Interfaces for Advanced Human-Robot Interaction

Matteo Macchini

Robotic systems are becoming more and more pervasive in modern industrial, scientific and personal activities through recent years and will play a fundamental role in the future society. Despite their increasing level of automation, teleoperation is still ...

EPFL2021