Publications related to Flight controller

The effects of kinematics, flexibility, and planform on the vortex formation and aerodynamic performance of flapping wing flight

In this thesis, the aerodynamic challenges in flapping wing flight are addressed. In particular, the effects of different wing kinematics, flexibilities, and planforms on the the leading edge vortex development and aerodynamic performance are investigated. ...

EPFL2023

Earwig-inspired foldable origami wing for micro air vehicle gliding

Jamie Paik, Risa Ishiguro

Foldable wings serve as an effective solution for reducing the size of micro air vehicles (MAVs) during non-flight phases, without compromising the gliding capacity provided by the wing area. Among insects, earwigs exhibit the highest folding ratio in thei ...

Frontiers Media Sa2023

Reconfigurable Drone System for Transportation of Parcels With Variable Mass and Size

Dario Floreano, Fabrizio Schiano, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski, Leonardo Cencetti

Cargo drones are designed to carry payloads with predefined shape, size, and/or mass. This lack of flexibility requires a fleet of diverse drones tailored to specific cargo dimensions. Here we propose a new reconfigurable drone based on a modular design th ...

2022

Real-Time Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Fast Mechatronic Systems

Petr Listov

This thesis presents an efficient and extensible numerical software framework for real-time model-based control. We are motivated by complex and challenging mechatronic applications spanning from flight control of fixed-wing aircraft and thrust vector cont ...

EPFL2022

Uncooperative Rendezvous in Space: Design of an Electronic Architecture for High Performance Avionic with Multi Sensor Input and Intensive Data Rate

Michaël Yannick Juillard

Active Debris Removal missions consist of sending a satellite in space and removing one or more debris from their current orbit. A key challenge is to obtain information about the uncooperative target. By gathering the velocity, position, and rotation of t ...

EPFL2022

Assessing Technology Adoption in the European Air Traffic Management: The Cases of Virtual Centre and Flight-Centric Operations

Engin Zeki

This research focuses on emerging technologies in the European air traffic management (ATM), specifically investigating technology adoption by the main stakeholders. The European ATM consists of a highly fragmented aviation infrastructure, built and manage ...

EPFL2020

Insect-Inspired Visual Perception for Flight Control and Collision Avoidance

Julien Jean Denis Nicolas Lecoeur

Flying robots are increasingly used for tasks such as aerial mapping, fast exploration, video footage and monitoring of buildings. Autonomous flight at low altitude in cluttered and unknown environments is an active research topic because it poses challen ...

EPFL2019

Haptic Guidance with a Soft Exoskeleton Reduces Error in Drone Teleoperation

Dario Floreano, Auke Ijspeert, Stefano Mintchev, Amy Roning Wu, Carine Rognon

Haptic guidance has been shown to improve performance in many fields as it can give additional information without overloading other sensory channels such as vision or audition. Our group is investigating new intuitive ways to interact with robots, and we ...

2018

Haptic Guidance with a Soft Exoskeleton Reduces Error in Drone Teleoperation

Dario Floreano, Auke Ijspeert, Stefano Mintchev, Amy Roning Wu, Carine Rognon

Haptic guidance has been shown to improve performance in many fields as it can give additional information without overloading other sensory channels such as vision or audition. Our group is investigating new intuitive ways to interact with robots, and we ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2018

Guidance, Navigation and Control for Autonomous Rendezvous and Docking of Nano-Satellites

Camille Sébastien Pirat

Is it possible to dock CubeSats in Low Earth Orbit? Challenges are associated with the level of miniaturisation: the docking accuracy is driven by the docking mechanism dimensions. The achievable docking performance with the Guidance, Navigation and Contro ...

EPFL2018

The effects of radiation on ablative heat shields during atmospheric entry

Nikhil Banerji

Spacecraft employ composite materials as Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) to survive entering a planetary atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. Under intense convective and radiative heating from the surrounding shock layer, these composites decompose and erode ...

EPFL2017

High accuracy GNSS based navigation in GEO

Pierre-André Farine, Cyril Botteron, Vincenzo Capuano, Paul David Blunt, Endrit Shehaj

Although significant improvements in efficiency and performance of communication satellites have been achieved in the past decades, it is expected that the demand for new platforms in Geostationary Orbit (GEO) and for the On-Orbit Servicing (OOS) on the ex ...

Elsevier2017

Standalone GPS L1 C/A Receiver for Lunar Missions

Pierre-André Farine, Cyril Botteron, Jérôme Leclère, Vincenzo Capuano, Paul David Blunt, Jia Tian, Yanguang Wang

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) were originally introduced to provide positioning and timing services for terrestrial Earth users. However, space users increasingly rely on GNSS for spacecraft navigation and other science applications at severa ...

Mdpi Ag2016

Failure of mounting bolt of helicopter main gearbox support strut

Predrag Andric

The mounting bolt of helicopter main gearbox support strut was fractured into two pieces during the flight mission. The fracture occurred at the root of the first engaged thread of the bolt-nut assembly. Visual inspection of the fracture zone revealed crac ...

Elsevier2016

Closed-loop magnetic bearing and angular velocity control of a reaction sphere actuator

Yves Perriard, Leopoldo Rossini

This article presents the first closed-loop magnetic bearing and angular velocity experimental results of a reaction sphere actuator for satellite attitude control. The proposed reaction sphere is a permanent magnet spherical actuator whose rotor is suppor ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2015

Run-to-Run Disturbance Rejection for Feedforward Path Following of an Adaptively Controlled Unmanned Helicopter

Timm Faulwasser

We present a scheme for run-to-run disturbance rejection in optimization-based feedforward path following of a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS). The proposed scheme is based on the inter-run estimation of unknown disturbances, such as wind forces an ...

2015

Learning Coupled Dynamical Systems from Human Demonstration for Robotic Eye-Arm-Hand Coordination

Aude Billard, Luka Lukic, José Santos-Victor

Efficient, adaptive and reliable visuomotor control system is crucial to enable robots to display flexibility in the face of changes in the environment. This paper takes inspiration in human eye-arm-hand coordination pattern to develop an equivalently robu ...

2012

Effects of Swirl Velocities From Fan Assemblies Mounted on Lifting Surfaces

Alexandros Terzis, Charilaos Kazakos, Nikolaos Papadopoulos

The penetration of a jet of fluid into a traversal moving stream is a basic configuration of a wide range of engineering applications, such as film cooling and V/STOL aircrafts. This investigation examines experimentally the effect of blowing ratio of fans ...

2011

Autonomous flight at low altitude using light sensors and little computational power

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Antoine Beyeler

The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and objects such as trees and buildings is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a serie ...

2010

Autonomous flight at low altitude with vision-based collision avoidance and GPS-based path following

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Antoine Beyeler

The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and other objects is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a series of optic-flow detect ...

IEEE2010