Publications by William John Stewart

Collision‐Resilient Winged Drones Enabled by Tensegrity Structures

Dario Floreano, Raphael Zufferey, William John Stewart, Mohammad Askari, Omar Aloui, Simon Jeger

Flying robots are becoming increasingly widespread, not only as remote‐vision agents but also as tools capable of physically interacting with our world. As robots fly closer to obstacles, the likelihood of collision rises. While collision resilience soluti ...

Wiley2025

Method for wind harvesting and wind rejection in flying drones

Dario Floreano, Victor Casas Rochel, Nathan Samuel Müller, Charalampos Vourtsis, William John Stewart

The present invention concerns a method of manoeuvring a vertical take-off and landing, unmanned aerial drone (100) comprising at least an aerodynamic surface (101), wherein, during a flight of the drone, the aerodynamic surface generates lift and/or drag ...

2024

Wind Defiant Morphing Drones

Dario Floreano, Victor Casas Rochel, Nathan Samuel Müller, Charalampos Vourtsis, William John Stewart

Intense winds are a challenge for vertical take-off and landing drones with wings. In particular, in the hovering regime, wings are sensitive to wind currents that can be detrimental to their operational and energetic performances. Tail-sitters are particu ...

2023

Avian-Inspired Claws Enable Robot Perching or Walking

Dario Floreano, William John Stewart, Won Dong Shin, Mohammad Askari

Multimodal unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are rarely capable of more than two modalities, i.e., flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding their operating enve ...

2023

Unleashing Soft Modular Robots by means of a Bio-inspired Connection Strategy

Dario Floreano, Davide Zappetti, William John Stewart

Untethering can allow soft modular robots to move from the laboratory test bench into realistic environments and commercial use. However, today’s state of the art soft modular robots remain electrically connected to external power sources and controllers. ...

IEEE2022

How to Swoop and Grasp Like a Bird With a Passive Claw for a High-Speed Grasping

Matthias Müller, Dario Floreano, Enrico Ajanic, William John Stewart

There is a growing interest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) grasping, perching, and interacting with their surroundings by means of claws, arms, hooks, and other appendages. While multirotor vehicles can slowly lower onto a target object and grasp it, w ...

2022

A Lightweight Device for Energy Harvesting from Power Lines with a Fixed-Wing UAV

Dario Floreano, William John Stewart

Modern UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) suffer from restrictions in flight range and time due to battery capacity limitations. One way to overcome these limitations is to harvest energy from overhead power lines. A growing body of scientific literature has ...

IEEE2022

How to compete with robots by assessing job automation risks and resilient alternatives

Dario Floreano, Nicola Nosengo, Fabrizio Schiano, William John Stewart, Davide Zambrano, Antonio Paolillo, Rafael Lalive

The effects of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) on the job market are matters of great social concern. Economists and technology experts are debating at what rate, and to what extent, technology could be used to replace humans in occupations, and ...

2022

Elastic-Actuation Mechanism for Repetitive Hopping Based on Power Modulation and Cyclic Trajectory Generation

Dario Floreano, Auke Ijspeert, Matthew Alfonso Estrada, William John Stewart, Won Dong Shin

Animal locomotion results from a combination of power modulation and cyclic appendage trajectories, but combining these two properties in small-sized robots is difficult. Here, we introduce and characterize a new elastic actuation system based on an invert ...

2022

Robotic Elytra: Insect-Inspired Protective Wings for Resilient and Multi-Modal Drones

Dario Floreano, Charalampos Vourtsis, William John Stewart

Winged drones that fly in close proximity to obstacles or that are capable of aerial and terrestrial locomotion can benefit from protective systems that prevent damage to delicate aerial structures. Existing protective solutions focus on multi-copter drone ...

2021

Insect Inspired Self-Righting for Fixed-Wing Drones

Dario Floreano, Victor Casas Rochel, Charalampos Vourtsis, William John Stewart

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are being used in a wide range of applications such as surveillance, reconnaissance, inspection, and search and rescue. However, due to their size and mission profiles, they are prone to tipping over, jeopardizing their operati ...

2021

Passive Perching with Energy Storage for Winged Aerial Robots

Dario Floreano, Yegor Piskarev, William John Stewart, Luca Guarino

Perching in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers the possibility of extending the range of aerial robots beyond the limits of their batteries. It has been a topic of intense study for multirotor UAVs. Perching in winged UAVs is harder because a kinetic e ...

2021

Downside Up:Rethinking Parcel Position for Aerial Delivery

Dario Floreano, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski, Mir Alikhan Bin Mohammad Feroskhan, William John Stewart

The conventional approach to parcel placement in most delivery drone designs today is to place the parcel centrally beneath the drone's rotor plane. However, if the parcel is too large, this will result in an obstruction of the propeller slipstream, incurr ...

2020

A Morphing Cargo Drone for Safe Flight in Proximity of Humans

Dario Floreano, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski, Mir Alikhan Bin Mohammad Feroskhan, William John Stewart

Delivery drones used by logistics companies today are equipped with unshielded propellers, which represent a major hurdle for in-hand parcel delivery. The exposed propeller blades are hazardous to unsuspecting bystanders, pets, and untrained users. One sol ...

2020

Traumatic brain injury: integrated approaches to improve prevention, clinical care, and research

Sean Lewis Hill, Deepak Gupta, William John Stewart

Elsevier2017