9 papers
Where to Perch in a Tree: Vision-Guidance for Tree-Grasping Drones
Alex Dunnett, Leonie Bottomley, Mirko Kovac +1
This study demonstrates a method to locate an ideal perch location on a tree for vision-guided autonomous tree-perching drones. Various image processing algorithms, including those…
Bumper Drone: Elastic Morphology Design for Aerial Physical Interaction
Pongporn Supa, Alex Dunnett, Feng Xiao +3
Aerial robots are evolving from avoiding obstacles to exploiting the environmental contact interactions for navigation, exploration and manipulation. A key challenge in such aerial…
AMBER: A tether-deployable gripping crawler with compliant microspines for canopy manipulation
P. A. Wigner, L. Romanello, A. Hammad +5
This paper presents an aerially deployable crawler designed for adaptive locomotion and manipulation within tree canopies. The system combines compliant microspine-based tracks, a…
Learning Agile Tensile Perching for Aerial Robots from Demonstrations
Kangle Yuan, Atar Babgei, Luca Romanello +5
Perching on structures such as trees, beams, and ledges is essential for extending the endurance of aerial robots by enabling energy conservation in standby or observation modes. A…
ForestVO: Enhancing Visual Odometry in Forest Environments through ForestGlue
Thomas Pritchard, Saifullah Ijaz, Ronald Clark +1
Recent advancements in visual odometry systems have improved autonomous navigation; however, challenges persist in complex environments like forests, where dense foliage, variable…
Maintaining Plasticity in Reinforcement Learning: A Cost-Aware Framework for Aerial Robot Control in Non-stationary Environments
Ali Tahir Karasahin, Ziniu Wu, Basaran Bahadir Kocer
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated the ability to maintain the plasticity of the policy throughout short-term training in aerial robot control. However, these policies ha…