Urban environments are time consuming, labor intensive and possibly dangerous to safe guard. Accomplishing tasks like bomb detection, search-andrescue and reconnaissance with aerial robots could save resources. This paper describes a prototype called CQAR: Closed Quarter Aerial Robot, which is capable of flying in and around buildings. The prototype was analytically designed to fly safely and s...

This paper outlines the possibilities, the evolution, and the basic technical elements of autonomously hovering micro robots. It consists of three parts. The first part presents the application Papa-TV-Bot, a free flying automatic video camera. The second part is a schedule for the long-term development of autonomously hovering mobots in 8 phases. The third part describes the basic technologies...

While navigating their environments it is essential for autonomous mobile robots to actively avoid collisions with obstacles. Flying insects perform this behavioural task with ease relying mainly on information the visual system provides. Here we implement a bioinspired collision avoidance algorithm based on the extraction of nearness information from visual motion on the hexapod walking robot ...

This paper presents an information theoretic approach to distributively control multiple robots equipped with sensors to infer the state of an environment. The robots iteratively estimate the environment state using a sequential Bayesian filter, while continuously moving along the gradient of mutual information to maximize the informativeness of the observations provided by their sensors. The g...

Main intention of autonomous devices’ designers is to develop tools used for implementation tasks, such as unknown territory exploration or performing tasks in strong radiation fields which are dangerous for human health and life. Unmanned flying objects used for military, mobile robots, space ships, exoskeletons or intelligent clothing monitoring body signals. These are only a few examples of ...

When operating flying robots we repeatedly face the necessity of tuning controllers for particular electronic and physical configurations. In the spirit of embodied robotic learning we want to tune the controllers during the system’s closed-loop operation. We present an experiment applying a black box Bayesian optimization technique to the problem of tuning a hierarchical vertical position PID ...

In this paper, we describe a system that enables a low-cost quadrocopter coupled with a ground-based laptop to navigate autonomously in previously unknown and GPSdenied environments. Our system consists of three components: a monocular SLAM system, an extended Kalman lter for data fusion and state estimation and a PID controller to generate steering commands. Next to a working system, the main ...

SUMMARY The question of control and stabilization of flexible space robots is considered. Although, this approach is applicable to space robots of other configurations, for simplicity, a flexible planar two-link robot, mounted on a rigid floating platform, is considered. The robotic arm has two revolute joints and its links undergo elastic deformation in the plane of rotation. Based on nonlinea...

The orientation of a space satellite may change due to the actuation of an attached manipulator. Such a motion is subject to the non-integrable and, therefore, nonholonomic constraints induced by the angular momentum conservation. Some of the previous literatures proposed methods to produce a desired change of the satellite orientation by controlling the attached manipulator. These methods trea...

In this paper, we present a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) for multiple autonomous helicopters in a complex.environment. The NMPC provides a framework to solve optimal discrete control problems for a nonlinear system under state constraints and input saturation. Our approach combines stabilization of vehicle dynamics and decentralized trajectory generation, by including a potential f...