In this paper we present an overview of the methods and systems that give rise to a flying robotic system capable of autonomous inspection, surveying, comprehensive multi-modal mapping and inventory tracking of construction sites with high degree of systematicity. The robotic system can operate assuming either no prior knowledge of the environment or by integrating a prior model of it. In the first case, autonomous exploration is provided which returns a high fidelity $3\textrm{D}$ map associated with color and thermal vision information. In the second case, the prior model of the structure can be used to provide optimized and repetitive coverage paths. The robot delivers its mapping result autonomously, while simultaneously being able to detect and localize objects of interest thus supporting inventory tracking tasks. The system has been field verified in a collection of environments and has been tested inside a construction project related to public housing.
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
This paper presents a method for cave surveying in total darkness using an autonomous aerial vehicle equipped with a depth camera for mapping, downward-facing camera for state estimation, and forward and downward lights. Traditional methods of cave surveying are labor-intensive and dangerous due to the risk of hypothermia when collecting data over extended periods of time in cold and damp environments, the risk of injury when operating in darkness in rocky or muddy environments, and the potential structural instability of the subterranean environment. Although these dangers can be mitigated by…
School of Computer Science, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland（爱尔兰国立高威大学计算机学院）
Autonomous robotics and artificial intelligence techniques can be used to support human personnel in the event of critical incidents. These incidents can pose great danger to human life. Some examples of such assistance include: multi-robot surveying of the scene; collection of sensor data and scene imagery, real-time risk assessment and analysis; object identification and anomaly detection; and retrieval of relevant supporting documentation such as standard operating procedures (SOPs). These incidents, although often rare, can involve chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear or explosive (C…
Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani（皮拉尼伯拉理工学院（BITS皮拉尼））；University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学雷诺分校）
This paper presents the design concept, modeling and motion planning solution for the aerial robotic chain. This design represents a configurable robotic system of systems, consisting of multi-linked micro aerial vehicles that simultaneously presents the ability to cross narrow sections, morph its shape, ferry significant payloads, offer the potential of distributed sensing and processing, and allow system extendability. We contribute an approach to address the motion planning problem of such a connected robotic system of systems, making full use of its reconfigurable nature, to find collision…
This report overviews a set of recent contributions in the field of path planning that were developed to enable the realization of the autonomous aerial robotic worker for inspection operations. The specific algorithmic contributions address several fundamental challenges of robotic inspection and exploration, and specifically those of optimal coverage planning given an a priori known model of the structure to be inspected, full coverage, optimized and fast inspection path planning, as well as efficient exploration of completely unknown environments and structures. All of the developed path pl…
Data driven robotics relies upon accurate real-world representations to learn useful policies. Despite our best-efforts, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer is still an unsolved problem, and we often need to allow our agents to explore online to learn useful policies for a given task. For many applications of field robotics online exploration is prohibitively expensive and dangerous, this is especially true in fixed-wing aerial robotics. To address these challenges we offer an intermediary solution for learning in field robotics. We investigate the use of dissimilar platform vehicle for learning an…
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院）
Inspired by recent promising results in sim-to-real transfer in deep learning we built a realistic simulation environment combining a Robot Operating System (ROS)-compatible physics simulator (Gazebo) with Cycles, the realistic production rendering engine from Blender. The proposed simulator pipeline allows us to simulate near-realistic RGB-D images. To showcase the capabilities of the simulator pipeline we propose a case study that focuses on indoor robotic farming. We developed a solution for sweet pepper yield estimation task. Our approach to yield estimation starts with aerial robotics con…
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Autonomous exploration of unknown environments has been widely applied in inspection, surveillance, and search and rescue. In exploration task, the basic requirement for robots is to detect the unknown space as fast as possible. In this paper, we propose an autonomous collaborative system consists of an aerial robot and a ground vehicle to explore in unknown environments. We combine the frontier based method and the harmonic field to generate a path. Then, For the ground robot, a minimum jerk piecewise Bezier curve which can guarantee safety and dynamical feasibility is generated amid obstacle…
Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology（锡金马尼帕尔理工学院）；BIT Mesra（梅斯拉理工学院）
According to the American Heritage Dictionary [1],Robotics is the science or study of the technology associated with the design, fabrication, theory, and application of Robots. The term Hoverbot is also often used to refer to sophisticated mechanical devices that are remotely controlled by human beings even though these devices are not autonomous. This paper describes a remotely controlled hoverbot by installing a transmitter and receiver on both sides that is the control computer (PC) and the hoverbot respectively. Data is transmitted as signal or instruction via a infrastructure network whic…
A novel autonomous microplastics surveying robot for beach environments
Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences（奥登计算工程与科学研究所）；Department of Civil, Architecture and Civil Engineering（土木工程与建筑系）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Department of Civil, Architecture and Environmental Engineering（土木工程与环境工程系）；Department of Chemistry（化学系）
Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies, Vilnius University（维尔纽斯大学数据科学与数字技术研究所）
Purpose: This paper presents a new dataset of Aerial Imagery from Robotics simulator (abbr. AIR). AIR dataset aims to provide a starting point for localization system development and to become a typical benchmark for accuracy comparison of map-based localization algorithms, visual odometry, and SLAM for high altitude flights. Design/methodology/approach: The presented dataset contains over 100 thousand aerial images captured from Gazebo robotics simulator using orthophoto maps as a ground plane. Flights with 3 different trajectories are performed on maps from urban and forest environment at di…
Aerial robotic systems have raised emerging interests in recent years. In this article, we propose a novel aerial manipulator system that is significantly different from conventional aerial discrete manipulators: An Aerial Continuum Manipulator (AeCoM). The AeCoM compactly integrates a quadrotor with a tendon-driven continuum robotic manipulator. Due to the compact design and the payload bearing ability of tendon-driven continuum robotic arms, the proposed system solved the conflict between payload capacity and dexterity lying in conventional aerial manipulators. Two contributions are made in …
A Comparative Study of INDI and NDI with Nonlinear Disturbance Observer for Aerial Robotics
Robotics and Mechatronics group, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science (EEMCS), University of Twente（代尔夫特理工大学电气工程、数学与计算机科学学院机器人与机电组）；School of Aerospace, Mechanical, and Mechatronic Engineering (AMME), Faculty of Engineering, University of Sydney（悉尼大学航空航天、机械与机电工程学院）；Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学计算机、控制与管理工程系）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Aerial manipulation aims at combining the manoeuvrability of aerial vehicles with the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms. This, however, comes at the cost of the additional control complexity due to the coupling of the dynamics of the two systems. In this paper we present a NMPC specifically designed for MAVs equipped with a robotic arm. We formulate a hybrid control model for the combined MAV-arm system which incorporates interaction forces acting on the end effector. We explain the practical implementation of our algorithm and show extensive experimental results of our custom built sy…
A Cross-Embodiment Gripper Benchmark for Rigid-Object Manipulation in Aerial and Industrial Robotics
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Kosice（机械工程学院，科西策技术大学）；GRVC Robotics Lab of Seville（塞维利亚GRVC机器人实验室）；Brubotics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and IMEC（Brubotics、布鲁塞尔自由大学和IMEC）
Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) is a powerful optimisation algorithm that can be used to locate global maxima in a search space. Recent interest in swarms of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) begs the question as to whether PSO can be used as a method to enable real robotic swarms to locate a target goal point. However, the original PSO algorithm does not take into account collisions between particles during search. In this paper we propose a novel algorithm called Force Field Particle Swarm Optimisation (FFPSO) that designates repellent force fields to particles such that these fields provide an…
Hongo Aerospace Inc.（本乡航空航天公司）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
In recent years, research and development in aerial robotics (i.e., unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs) has been growing at an unprecedented speed, and there is a need to summarize the background, latest developments, and trends of UAV research. Along with a general overview on the definition, types, categories, and topics of UAV, this work describes a systematic way to identify 1,318 high-quality UAV papers from more than thirty thousand that have been appeared in the top journals and conferences. On top of that, we provide a bird's-eye view of UAV research since 2001 by summarizing various stati…
We present an efficient path planning algorithm for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle surveying a cluttered urban landscape. A special emphasis is on maximizing area surveyed while adhering to constraints of the UAV and partially known and updating environment. A Voronoi bias is introduced in the probabilistic roadmap building phase to identify certain critical milestones for maximal surveillance of the search space. A kinematically feasible but coarse tour connecting these milestones is generated by the global path planner. A local path planner then generates smooth motion primitives between consecu…
We present PATHoBot an autonomous crop surveying and intervention robot for glasshouse environments. The aim of this platform is to autonomously gather high quality data and also estimate key phenotypic parameters. To achieve this we retro-fit an off-the-shelf pipe-rail trolley with an array of multi-modal cameras, navigation sensors and a robotic arm for close surveying tasks and intervention. In this paper we describe PATHoBot design choices made to ensure proper operation in a commercial glasshouse environment. As a surveying platform we collect a number of datasets which include both sweet…
This technical report addresses the problem of optimal surveillance of the route followed by a dynamic parade using a team of aerial robots. The dynamic parade is considered to take place within an urban environment, it is discretized and at every iteration, the algorithm computes the best possible placing of the aerial robotic team members, subject to their camera model and the occlusions arising from the environment. As the parade route is only as well covered as its least-covered point, the optimization objective is to place the aerial robots such that they maximize the minimum coverage ove…
Nature is an inhabitant for enormous number of species. All the species do perform complex activities with simple and elegant rules for their survival. The property of emergence of collective behavior is remarkably supporting their activities. One form of the collective behaviour is the swarm intelligence -- all agents poses same rules and capabilities. This equality along with local cooperation in the agents tremendously leads to achieving global results. Some of the swarm behaviours in the nature includes birds formations , fish school maneuverings, ants movement. Recently, one school of res…
AeroScene: Progressive Scene Synthesis for Aerial Robotics
University of Liverpool, UK（英国利物浦大学）；AIOZ Ltd., Singapore（新加坡AIOZ有限公司）；National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan（台湾国立清华大学）；RMIT University, Vietnam Campus（越南RMIT大学校园）；University of Information Technology, VNUHCM, Vietnam（越南VNUHCM大学信息科技学院）
A Remote Sim2real Aerial Competition: Fostering Reproducibility and Solutions' Diversity in Robotics Challenges
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究所）；Ekumen；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Avian-Inspired High-Precision Tracking Control for Aerial Manipulators
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Westlake Institute for Optoelectronics（西湖光电研究院）；Future Industrial Research Centre, Westlake University（西湖大学未来产业研究中心）；Institute of Advanced Technology, Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院先进技术研究所）
Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学）；IT+Robotics Srl（IT+Robotics有限责任公司）；International Research Lab 2958 Georgia Tech-CNRS（佐治亚理工-法国国家科学研究中心2958国际研究实验室）；University of Freiburg（弗莱堡大学）；Toyota Research Institute（丰田研究院）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；Agency for Agro-food Sector Services of the Marche Region (ASSAM)（马尔凯大区农业食品部门服务局）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
The application of autonomous robots in agriculture is gaining increasing popularity thanks to the high impact it may have on food security, sustainability, resource use efficiency, reduction of chemical treatments, and the optimization of human effort and yield. With this vision, the Flourish research project aimed to develop an adaptable robotic solution for precision farming that combines the aerial survey capabilities of small autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with targeted intervention performed by multi-purpose unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). This paper presents an overview of …
Self-Organizing Aerial Swarm Robotics for Resilient Load Transportation : A Table-Mechanics-Inspired Approach
School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学自动化科学与电气工程学院）；Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学机械与自动化工程系）
Hierarchical Whole-body Control of the cable-Suspended Aerial Manipulator endowed with Winch-based Actuation
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心（DLR））；University of Twente（特文特大学）；Dextrous Robotics Inc.（灵巧机器人公司）；Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica（航空技术研究所）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院（KAIST））；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）
Edge computing is becoming more and more popular among researchers who seek to take advantage of the edge resources and the minimal time delays, in order to run their robotic applications more efficiently. Recently, many edge architectures have been proposed, each of them having their advantages and disadvantages, depending on each application. In this work, we present two different edge architectures for controlling the trajectory of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). The first architecture is based on docker containers and the second one is based on kubernetes, while the main framework for op…
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zürich)（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Flying manipulators are aerial drones with attached rigid-bodied robotic arms and belong to the latest and most actively developed research areas in robotics. The rigid nature of these arms often lack compliance, flexibility, and smoothness in movement. This work proposes to use a soft-bodied robotic arm attached to an omnidirectional micro aerial vehicle (OMAV) to leverage the compliant and flexible behavior of the arm, while remaining maneuverable and dynamic thanks to the omnidirectional drone as the floating base. The unification of the arm with the drone poses challenges in the modeling a…
We present a fully integrated autonomous multi- robot aerial system for finding and collecting moving and static objects with unknown locations. This task addresses multiple relevant problems in search and rescue (SAR) robotics such as multi-agent aerial exploration, object detection and tracking, and aerial gripping. Usually, the community tackles these problems individually but the integration into a working system generates extra complexity which is rarely addressed. We show that this task can be solved reliably using only simple components. Our decentralized system uses accurate global sta…
Aerial drones have great potential to monitor large areas quickly and efficiently. Aquaculture is an industry that requires continuous water quality data to successfully grow and harvest fish. The Hybrid Aerial Underwater Robotic System (HAUCS) is designed to collect water quality data of aquaculture ponds to reduce labor costs for farmers. The routing of drones to cover each fish pond on an aquaculture farm can be reduced to the Vehicle Routing Problem. A dataset is created to simulate the distribution of ponds on a farm and is used to assess the HAUCS Path Planning Algorithm (HPP). Its perfo…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学雷诺分校）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；Flyability（Flyability公司）；Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学牛津机器人研究所）
Autonomous exploration of subterranean environments constitutes a major frontier for robotic systems as underground settings present key challenges that can render robot autonomy hard to achieve. This has motivated the DARPA Subterranean Challenge, where teams of robots search for objects of interest in various underground environments. In response, the CERBERUS system-of-systems is presented as a unified strategy towards subterranean exploration using legged and flying robots. As primary robots, ANYmal quadruped systems are deployed considering their endurance and potential to traverse challe…
This work contributes a marsupial robotic system-of-systems involving a legged and an aerial robot capable of collaborative mapping and exploration path planning that exploits the heterogeneous properties of the two systems and the ability to selectively deploy the aerial system from the ground robot. Exploiting the dexterous locomotion capabilities and long endurance of quadruped robots, the marsupial combination can explore within large-scale and confined environments involving rough terrain. However, as certain types of terrain or vertical geometries can render any ground system unable to c…
We present a framework for a ground-aerial robotic team to explore large, unstructured, and unknown environments. In such exploration problems, the effectiveness of existing exploration-boosting heuristics often scales poorly with the environments' size and complexity. This work proposes a novel framework combining incremental frontier distribution, goal selection with Monte-Carlo view quality rendering, and an automatic-differentiable information gain measure to improve exploration efficiency. Simulated with multiple complex environments, we demonstrate that the proposed method effectively ut…
This article presents a novel framework for performing visual inspection around 3D infrastructures, by establishing a team of fully autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with robust localization, planning and perception capabilities. The proposed aerial inspection system reaches high level of autonomy on a large scale, while pushing to the boundaries the real life deployment of aerial robotics. In the presented approach, the MAVs deployed for the inspection of the structure rely only on their onboard computer and sensory systems. The developed framework envisions a modular system, combining …
Reshaping UAV-Enabled Communications with Omnidirectional Multi-Rotor Aerial Vehicles
College of Computing, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University（穆罕默德六世理工大学计算机学院）；Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克布拉格技术大学）；International University of Rabat（拉巴特国际大学）
Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalisable Cross-View Localisation in Planetary Ground-Aerial Robotic Teams
AI for Space Group and 3 Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources, The University of Adelaide（AI空间组和安迪·托马斯太空资源中心，阿德莱德大学）；Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA（喷气推进实验室，加州理工学院，帕萨迪纳，CA 91109，美国）；California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）
Deployment of small cells in dense urban areas dedicated to the heterogeneous network (HetNet) and associated relay nodes for improving backhauling is expected to be an important structural element in the design of beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G wireless access networks. A key operational aspect in HetNets is how to optimally implement the wireless backhaul links to efficiently support the traffic demand. In this work, we utilize the recently proposed Robotic Aerial Small Cells (RASCs) that are able to grasp at different tall urban landforms as wireless relay nodes for backhauling. This can be conside…
Multilinked aerial robot is one of the state-of-the-art works in aerial robotics, which demonstrates the deformability benefiting both maneuvering and manipulation. However, the performance in outdoor physical world has not yet been evaluated because of the weakness in the controllability and the lack of the state estimation for autonomous flight. Thus we adopt tilting propellers to enhance the controllability. The related design, modeling and control method are developed in this work to enable the stable hovering and deformation. Furthermore, the state estimation which involves the time synch…
For robotic systems to succeed in high risk, real-world situations, they have to be quickly deployable and robust to environmental changes, under-performing hardware, and mission subtask failures. These robots are often designed to consider a single sequence of mission events, with complex algorithms lowering individual subtask failure rates under some critical constraints. Our approach utilizes common techniques in vision and control, and encodes robustness into mission structure through outcome monitoring and recovery strategies. In addition, our system infrastructure enables rapid deploymen…
Vision Language Action (VLA) Models for Unmanned Aerial Robotics and Bimanual Manipulation: A Review
Chef Robotics；RovifyLab；IT Application Research Center, Jeonbuk Regional Branch；Department of Electrical, Computer and Software Engineering（电气与计算机软件工程系）
