There are not yet autonomous flying robots capable of manoeuvring in small cluttered environments as insects do. Encouraged by this observation, this thesis presents the development of ultra-light flying robots and control systems going one step toward fully autonomous indoor aerial navigation. The substantial weight and energy constraints imposed by this indoor flying robots preclude the use o...

This paper addresses the problems of planning and control of the on-orbit maneuvering of large and highly flexible structures by free-flying robots. An approach is proposed where the robots use their thrusters to control the “rigid body” motion of the robot-structure system being transported and their manipulators to control and damp out vibration in the structure induced by the thruster firing...

A Space Free-Flying Robot (SFFR) includes an actuated base equipped with one or more manipulators to perform on-orbit missions. Distinct from fixed-based manipulators, the spacecraft (base) of a SFFR responds to dynamic reaction forces due to manipulator motions. In order to control such a system, it is essential to consider the dynamic coupling between the manipulators and the base. Explicit d...

A major challenge in swarm robotics is efficiently deploying robots into unknown environments, minimising energy and time costs. This is especially important with small aerial robots which have extremely limited flight autonomy. This paper compares three deployment strategies characterised by nominal computation, memory, communication and sensing requirements, and hence are suitable for flying ...

Flying robots that can locomote efficiently in GPS-denied cluttered environments have many applications, such as in search and rescue scenarios. However, dealing with the high amount of obstacles inherent to such environments is a major challenge for flying vehicles. Conventional flying platforms cannot afford to collide with obstacles, as the disturbance from the impact may provoke a crash to ...

This paper presents a practical method for small-scale VTOL design. It helps for elements selection and dimensioning. We apply the latter to design a fully autonomous quadrotor with numerous innovations in design methodology, steering and propulsion achieving 100% thrust margin for 30min autonomy. The robot is capable of rotational and translational motion estimation. Finally, we derive a nonli...

We describe a new experimental approach whereby an indoor flying robot evolves the ability to navigate in a textured room using only visual information and neuromorphic control. The architecture of a spiking neural circuit, which is connected to the vision system and to the motors, is genetically encoded and evolved on the physical robot without human intervention. The flying robot consists of ...

Flying robots require a combination of accuracy and low latency in their state estimation in order to achieve stable and robust flight. However, due to the power and payload constraints of aerial platforms, state estimation algorithms must provide these qualities under the computational constraints of embedded hardware. Cameras and inertial measurement units (IMUs) satisfy these power and paylo...