Multi-robot systems (MRS) composed of multiple mobile robots have been used for various collective exploration and perception tasks, such as mapping unknown environments, disaster response, and surveillance and monitoring. The performance of MRS in such applications is constrained by the capabilities of the payloads that the robots can carry on-board,...

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,...

­Background The advent of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has opened numerous opportunities for executing perilous and mission-critical tasks such as search and rescue, exploration in radioactive and hazardous environments, inspection of vertical structures, and water sample collection. The task of object collection on water surfaces is challenging...

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...

Background In conventional quadrotors, motors and electronics are mounted on a rigid structure, which limits vehicle maneuverability. To address this challenge, several flexible multirotor designs have emerged. These include pulley-operated schemes for rotation of arms that enable in-flight morphing, and mechanisms for tilting motors to alter flight...