Publications de Valentin Wüest

Accurate and agile flight with winged drones

Drones hold promise to assist in civilian tasks. To realize this application, future drones must operate within large cities, covering large distances while navigating within cluttered urban landscapes. The increased efficiency of winged drones over rotary ...

EPFL2024

Adaptive morphing of wing and tail for stable, resilient, and energy-efficient flight of avian-inspired drones

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Simon Jeger

Avian-inspired drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control strategies accommodatin ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024

Agile perching maneuvers in birds and morphing-wing drones

Dario Floreano, Enrico Ajanic, Valentin Wüest, Simon Jeger

Avian perching maneuvers are one of the most frequent and agile flight sce narios, where highly optimized flight trajectories, produced by rapid wing and tail morphing that generate high angular rates and accelerations, reduce kinetic energy at impact. Whi ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024

Co-Design Optimisation of Morphing Topology and Control of Winged Drones

Dario Floreano, Valentin Wüest, Fabio Bergonti

The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient solution. However, m ...

IEEE2024

Training Efficient Controllers via Analytic Policy Gradient

Dario Floreano, Davide Scaramuzza, Valentin Wüest

Control design for robotic systems is complex and often requires solving an optimization to follow a trajectory accurately. Online optimization approaches like Model Predictive Control (MPC) have been shown to achieve great tracking performance, but requir ...

New York2023

Sharp turning maneuvers with avian-inspired wing and tail morphing

Dario Floreano, Enrico Ajanic, Mir Alikhan Bin Mohammad Feroskhan, Valentin Wüest

Flight in dense environments, such as forests and cities requires drones to perform sharp turns. Although fixed-wing drones are aerodynamically and energetically more efficient than multicopters, they require a comparatively larger area to turn and thus ar ...

2022

Accurate Vision-based Flight with Fixed-Wing Drones

Dario Floreano, Enrico Ajanic, Valentin Wüest

Fixed-wing drones must navigate to the desired location accurately for maneuvers such as picking up objects and perching. However, current GNSS receivers limit their navigation accuracy to several meters in outdoor environments, making such maneuvers impos ...

2022

VIODE: A Simulated Dataset to Address the Challenges of Visual-Inertial Odometry in Dynamic Environments

Dario Floreano, Fabian Maximilian Schilling, Valentin Wüest, Koji Minoda

Dynamic environments such as urban areas are still challenging for popular visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithms. Existing datasets typically fail to capture the dynamic nature of these environments, therefore making it difficult to quantitatively eval ...

2021