Drones

Multicopters (SRL Imperial College)

We run OKVIS on our multicopter drones as a basis for fully autonomous operation. We are exploring several Model-Predictive Controllers (MPC) and are working on model-based motion planning for save navigation through free space that is reconstructed by our dense SLAM algorithms.

We have participated in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2017 in Abu Dhabi together with members from Imperial’s Aerial Robotics Lab. We were admitted to the finals with some of the most well-known robotics groups from all over the world. We also regularly demonstrate our drone-related research at the Imperial Festival.

More recently, we have also been exploring aggressive drone flight and motor failure identification and recovery employing Non-linear Model Predictive Control (NMPC). The scheme lets the drones fly aerobatic maneouvers it has never seen (learnt) before and deal with failures in an optimal way by considering the identified non-linear drone dynamics.

Former collaborators:

Dr Dimos Tzoumanikas (previously SRL Imperial College)
Qingyue Yan (previously SRL Imperial College)
Marius Grimm (previously SRL Imperial College and ETH Zurich)
Wenbin Li (previously SRL Imperial College, now University of Bath)

Collaboration within the Aerial Additive Manufacturing project:

Aerial Robotics Lab at Imperial College (Dr Mirko Kovac, Dr Ketao Zhang, and many more)
UCL (Dr Robert Stuart-Smith, Dr Vijay Pawar, and many more)
University of Bath (Dr Chris C.K. Williams, Dr Richard Ball, Dr Paul Shepherd, and many more)

Solar Aeroplanes (ETH Zurich)

The described multi-sensor estimators with and without computer vision involved have been deployed on UAS. Both long-endurance solar aeroplanes as well as multicopter platforms were used to this end.

Former collaborators at ETH Zurich:

Dr Philipp Oettershagen
Dr Konrad Rudin
Amir Melzer
Thomas Mantel
Dr Michael Burri
Dr Markus Achtelik
Dr Kostas Alexis
Prof. Roland Siegwart

Related Publications

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2020

Conference and Workshop Papers
[]		Aerial Manipulation Using Hybrid Force and Position NMPC Applied to Aerial Writing (D Tzoumanikas, F Graule, Q Yan, D Shah, M Popovic and S Leutenegger), In , 2020. [bibtex]
[]		Nonlinear mpc with motor failure identification and recovery for safe and aggressive multicopter flight (D Tzoumanikas, Q Yan and S Leutenegger), In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020. [bibtex]
[]		Fast frontier-based information-driven autonomous exploration with an MAV (A Dai, S Papatheodorou, N Funk, D Tzoumanikas and S Leutenegger), In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020. [bibtex]

2019
Journal Articles
[]		Bioinspired design of a landing system with soft shock absorbers for autonomous aerial robots (K Zhang, P Chermprayong, D Tzoumanikas, W Li, M Grimm, M Smentoch, S Leutenegger and M Kovac), In Journal of Field Robotics, volume 36, 2019. [bibtex]
[]		Fully autonomous micro air vehicle flight and landing on a moving target using visual–inertial estimation and model-predictive control (D Tzoumanikas, W Li, M Grimm, K Zhang, M Kovac and S Leutenegger), In Journal of Field Robotics, volume 36, 2019. [bibtex]

2017
Journal Articles
[]		Design of small hand-launched solar-powered UAVs: From concept study to a multi-day world endurance record flight (P Oettershagen, A Melzer, T Mantel, K Rudin, T Stastny, B Wawrzacz, T Hinzmann, S Leutenegger, K Alexis and R Siegwart), In Journal of Field Robotics, volume 34, 2017. [bibtex]

2015
Conference and Workshop Papers
[]		A solar-powered hand-launchable UAV for low-altitude multi-day continuous flight (P Oettershagen, A Melzer, T Mantel, K Rudin, R Lotz, D Siebenmann, S Leutenegger, K Alexis and R Siegwart), In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015. [bibtex]

2014
Conference and Workshop Papers
[]		Robust state estimation for small unmanned airplanes (S Leutenegger, A Melzer, K Alexis and R Siegwart), In 2014 IEEE Conference on Control Applications (CCA), 2014. [bibtex]
[]		Explicit model predictive control and l 1-navigation strategies for fixed-wing uav path tracking (P Oettershagen, A Melzer, S Leutenegger, K Alexis and R Siegwart), In 22nd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, 2014. [bibtex]
PhD Thesis
[]		Unmanned solar airplanes: Design and algorithms for efficient and robust autonomous operation (S Leutenegger), PhD thesis, ETH Zurich, 2014. [bibtex]

2013
Conference and Workshop Papers
[]		A UAV system for inspection of industrial facilities (J Nikolic, M Burri, J Rehder, S Leutenegger, C Huerzeler and R Siegwart), In 2013 IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2013. [bibtex]