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Design and Control of a Micro Overactuated Aerial Robot with an Origami Delta Manipulator
(2023)2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)This work presents the mechanical design and control of a novel small-size and lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) for aerial manipulation. To our knowledge, with a total take-off mass of only 2.0 kg, the proposed system is the most lightweight Aerial Manipulator (AM) that has 8-DOF independently controllable: 5 for the aerial platform and 3 for the articulated arm. We designed the robot to be fully-actuated in the body forward direction. ...Conference Paper -
A Multi-Segment, Soft Growing Robot with Selective Steering
(2023)2023 IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)Everting, soft growing vine robots benefit from reduced friction with their environment, which allows them to navigate challenging terrain. Vine robots can use air pouches attached to their sides for lateral steering. However, when all pouches are serially connected, the whole robot can only perform one constant curvature in free space. It must contact the environment to navigate through obstacles along paths with multiple turns. This ...Conference Paper -
Resilient Terrain Navigation with a 5 DOF Metal Detector Drone
(2023)2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) hold the potential for performing autonomous and contactless land surveys for the detection of landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW). Metal detectors are the standard detection tool but must be operated close to and parallel to the terrain. A successful combination of MAVs with metal detectors has not been presented yet, as it requires advanced flight capabilities. To this end, we present an autonomous ...Conference Paper -
A Perching and Tilting Aerial Robot for Precise and Versatile Power Tool Work on Vertical Walls
(2023)2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)Drilling, grinding, and setting anchors on vertical walls are fundamental processes in everyday construction work. Manually doing these works is error-prone, potentially dangerous, and elaborate at height. Today, heavy mobile ground robots can perform automatic power tool work. However, aerial vehicles could be deployed in untraversable environments and reach inaccessible places. Existing drone designs do not provide the large forces, ...Conference Paper -
Obstacle avoidance using Raycasting and Riemannian Motion Policies at kHz rates for MAVs
(2023)2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)This paper presents a novel method for using Riemannian Motion Policies on volumetric maps, shown in the example of obstacle avoidance for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), Today, most robotic obstacle avoidance algorithms rely on sampling or optimization-based planners with volumetric maps. However, they are computationally expensive and often have inflexible monolithic architectures. Riemannian Motion Policies are a modular, parallelizable, ...Conference Paper -
Aerial Layouting: Design and Control of a Compliant and Actuated End-Effector for Precise In-flight Marking on Ceilings
(2022)Proceedings of Robotics: Science and System XVIIIAerial robots have demonstrated impressive feats of precise control, such as dynamic flight through openings or highly complex choreographies. Despite the accuracy needed for these tasks, there are problems that require levels of precision that are challenging to achieve today. One such problem is aerial interaction. Advances in aerial robot design and control have made such contact-based tasks possible and opened up research into challenging ...Conference Paper -
Sampling-free obstacle gradients and reactive planning in Neural Radiance Fields
(2022)This work investigates the use of Neural implicit representations, specifically Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), for geometrical queries and motion planning. We show that by adding the capacity to infer occupancy in a radius to a pre trained NeRF we are effectively learning an approximation to a Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF). Even more, using backward differentiation of the network, we readily obtain the obstacle gradients that are ...Conference Paper -
Conditioned deep feature consistent variational autoencoder for simulating realistic sonar images
(2022)OCEANS 2022, Hampton RoadsMultibeam imaging sonar is one of the primary sensors for underwater navigation with uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) due to the robustness to turbidity and variable lighting conditions that limit the applicability of standard cameras. However, the operating principles and noise models of real sensors make imaging sonar challenging to accurately simulate, and acquiring real images experimentally is difficult and costly. This paper ...Conference Paper -
FlowBot: Flow-based Modeling for Robot Navigation
(2022)2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)Autonomous navigation among people is a complex problem that also exhibits considerable variation depending on the type of environment and people involved. Here we consider navigation among crowds that exhibit flow-like behavior like people moving through a train station. We propose a novel pseudo-fluid model of crowd flow for such problems. These have an intuitive physical interpretation and do not require much tuning. We further formalize ...Conference Paper -
Semi-automatic 3D Object Keypoint Annotation and Detection for the Masses
(2022)2022 26th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)Creating computer vision datasets requires careful planning and lots of time and effort. In robotics research, we often have to use standardized objects, such as the YCB object set, for tasks such as object tracking, pose estimation, grasping and manipulation, as there are datasets and pre-learned methods available for these objects. This limits the impact of our research since learning-based computer vision methods can only be used in ...Conference Paper