Background Drones have provided significant improvements for industries including surveillance, research, and agriculture with their highly advanced aerial abilities. They provide enhanced safety and security measures and allow critical tasks to be completed remotely. Drones enable goods to be transported rapidly to remote areas with little infrastructure...

Background Recent designs for quadrotors have focused on improving mechanical feasibility, including foldable and reconfigurable bodies. Foldable quadrotors, for example, are capable of flying through small openings and cluttered spaces. However, there has been limited research conducted on the tracking performance of the quadrotor during in-flight...

Perching highlights the ability for aerial robots to save energy and maintain a vantage position for monitoring or surveillance. Existing aerial robots coordinate perching mechanisms and flight dynamics to achieve perching. However, there is often a dissociation between controlled collision and dynamic perching in existing designs of aerial robots,...

For a rigid quadrotor, flying through constrained spaces often relies on computer vision techniques to execute aggressive maneuvers or performing real-time trajectory re-planning to avoid cluttered areas. Alternatively, a quadrotor can have an adaptive morphology, where a folding mechanism helps the quadrotor fly through narrow apertures. In previous...

Background Multicopters are being increasingly deployed for various tasks such as pick and place, and contaminant collection. To enable aerial grasping and manipulation, multicopters are equipped with rigid or soft graspers. However, aerial grasping and manipulation is a challenging task as it requires extremely precise real-time position control which...