Vision is a very important sense for humans. Robots also need to be aware of their environment for working in it. This is even more important for mobile robots that operate in unknown environments that are not prepared for robots. In this paper, we focus on the aspect of navigation of mobile robots for applications in search and rescue as well as planetary exploration. We discuss a typical visi...

Employing a group of independently controlled flying micro air vehicles (MAVs) for aerial coverage missions, instead of a single flying robot, increases the robustness and efficiency of the missions. Designing a group of MAVs requires addressing new challenges, such as inter-robot collision avoidance and formation control, where individual’s knowledge about the relative location of their local ...

Safe robot navigation is a fundamental research field for autonomous robots including ground mobile robots and flying robots. The primary objective of a safe robot navigation algorithm is to guide an autonomous robot from its initial position to a target or along a desired path with obstacle avoidance. With the development of information technology and sensor technology, the implementations com...

Free-flying space manipulator systems, in which robotic manipulators are mounted on a free-flying spacecraft, are envisioned for assembling, maintenance, repair, and contingency operations in space. Nevertheless, even for fixed-base systems, control of mechanical manipulators is a challenging task. This is due to strong nonlinearities in the equations of motion, and consequently different algor...

Employing a swarm of independently controlled flying micro air vehicles (MAVs) for aerial coverage missions, instead of a single flying robot, increases the robustness and efficiency of the missions. Designing a swarm of MAVs requires addressing new challenges, such as inter-robot collision avoidance and formation control, where individual’s knowledge about the relative location of their local ...

In their daily lives, flying insects face a gauntlet of environmental challenges, from wind gusts to raindrop impacts. In this combined experimental and theoretical study, we use high-speed videography to film raindrop collisions upon both flying insects and dynamically scaled spherical mimics. We identify three outcomes of the collision based upon the insect’s mass and characteristic size: dro...

Due to developments driven mostly by the demands of the mobile communication industry and preparatory work by model aircraft flyers, it is possible to construct different sorts of electrically powered flying robots that can carry an interesting amount of payload in sensors and computers. We are interested in realising autonomous navigation capabilities on real flying robots which should suffice...

In this paper we describe a new approach to make use of a heterogeneous robot team for the RoboCup Rescue League Virtual Robot competition. We will demonstrate coordinated action between a flying and a ground robot. The flying robot is used for fast exploration and allows the operator to find the places where victims are present in the environment. Due to the fast aggregation of the location er...

In order to control gymnastic and jumping robots, we will derive the complete analytical solution to the posture control problem of a two-link free flying object with initial angular momentum. We will show that the solution involves singular control and derive formulas to calculate the optimal switching condition, optimal terminal time and optimal trajectories. As an application, a high diving ...