Neural-Fly enables rapid learning for agile flight in strong winds.

Executing safe and precise flight maneuvers in dynamic high-speed winds is important for the ongoing commoditization of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, because the relationship between various wind conditions and its effect on aircraft maneuverability is not well understood, it is challenging to design effective robot controllers using traditional control design methods. We present Neural-Fly, a learning-based approach that allows rapid online adaptation by incorporating pretrained representations through deep learning. Neural-Fly builds on two key observations that aerodynamics in different wind conditions share a common representation and that the wind-specific part lies in a low-dimensional space. To that end, Neural-Fly uses a proposed learning algorithm, domain adversarially invariant meta-learning (DAIML), to learn the shared representation, only using 12 minutes of flight data. With the learned representation as a basis, Neural-Fly then uses a composite adaptation law to update a set of linear coefficients for mixing the basis elements. When evaluated under challenging wind conditions generated with the Caltech Real Weather Wind Tunnel, with wind speeds up to 43.6 kilometers/hour (12.1 meters/second), Neural-Fly achieves precise flight control with substantially smaller tracking error than stateof-the-art nonlinear and adaptive controllers. In addition to strong empirical performance, the exponential stability of Neural-Fly results in robustness guarantees. Last, our control design extrapolates to unseen wind conditions, is shown to be effective for outdoor flights with only onboard sensors, and can transfer across drones with minimal performance degradation.

A bipedal walking robot that can fly, slackline, and skateboard.

Numerous mobile robots in various forms specialize in either ground or aerial locomotion, whereas very few robots can perform complex locomotion tasks beyond simple walking and flying. We present the design and control of a multimodal locomotion robotic platform called LEONARDO, which bridges the gap between two different locomotion regimes of flying and walking using synchronized control of distributed electric thrusters and a pair of multijoint legs. By combining two distinct locomotion mechanisms, LEONARDO achieves complex maneuvers that require delicate balancing, such as walking on a slackline and skateboarding, which are challenging for existing bipedal robots. LEONARDO also demonstrates agile walking motions, interlaced with flying maneuvers to overcome obstacles using synchronized control of propellers and leg joints. The mechanical design and synchronized control strategy achieve a unique multimodal locomotion capability that could potentially enable robotic missions and operations that would be difficult for single-modal locomotion robots.

A seasonally invariant deep transform for visual terrain-relative navigation.

Visual terrain-relative navigation (VTRN) is a localization method based on registering a source image taken from a robotic vehicle against a georeferenced target image. With high-resolution imagery databases of Earth and other planets now available, VTRN offers accurate, drift-free navigation for air and space robots even in the absence of external positioning signals. Despite its potential for high accuracy, however, VTRN remains extremely fragile to common and predictable seasonal effects, such as lighting, vegetation changes, and snow cover. Engineered registration algorithms are mature and have provable geometric advantages but cannot accommodate the content changes caused by seasonal effects and have poor matching skill. Approaches based on deep learning can accommodate image content changes but produce opaque position estimates that either lack an interpretable uncertainty or require tedious human annotation. In this work, we address these issues with targeted use of deep learning within an image transform architecture, which converts seasonal imagery to a stable, invariant domain that can be used by conventional algorithms without modification. Our transform preserves the geometric structure and uncertainty estimates of legacy approaches and demonstrates superior performance under extreme seasonal changes while also being easy to train and highly generalizable. We show that classical registration methods perform exceptionally well for robotic visual navigation when stabilized with the proposed architecture and are able to consistently anticipate reliable imagery. Gross mismatches were nearly eliminated in challenging and realistic visual navigation tasks that also included topographic and perspective effects.

A biomimetic robotic platform to study flight specializations of bats.

Bats have long captured the imaginations of scientists and engineers with their unrivaled agility and maneuvering characteristics, achieved by functionally versatile dynamic wing conformations as well as more than 40 active and passive joints on the wings. Wing flexibility and complex wing kinematics not only bring a unique perspective to research in biology and aerial robotics but also pose substantial technological challenges for robot modeling, design, and control. We have created a fully self-contained, autonomous flying robot that weighs 93 grams, called Bat Bot (B2), to mimic such morphological properties of bat wings. Instead of using a large number of distributed control actuators, we implement highly stretchable silicone-based membrane wings that are controlled at a reduced number of dominant wing joints to best match the morphological characteristics of bat flight. First, the dominant degrees of freedom (DOFs) in the bat flight mechanism are identified and incorporated in B2's design by means of a series of mechanical constraints. These biologically meaningful DOFs include asynchronous and mediolateral movements of the armwings and dorsoventral movements of the legs. Second, the continuous surface and elastic properties of bat skin under wing morphing are realized by an ultrathin (56 micrometers) membranous skin that covers the skeleton of the morphing wings. We have successfully achieved autonomous flight of B2 using a series of virtual constraints to control the articulated, morphing wings.

Flight mechanics of a tailless articulated wing aircraft.

This paper investigates the flight mechanics of a micro aerial vehicle without a vertical tail in an effort to reverse-engineer the agility of avian flight. The key to stability and control of such a tailless aircraft lies in the ability to control the incidence angles and dihedral angles of both wings independently. The dihedral angles can be varied symmetrically on both wings to control aircraft speed independently of the angle of attack and flight path angle, while asymmetric dihedral can be used to control yaw in the absence of a vertical stabilizer. It is shown that wing dihedral angles alone can effectively regulate sideslip during rapid turns and generate a wide range of equilibrium turn rates while maintaining a constant flight speed and regulating sideslip. Numerical continuation and bifurcation analysis are used to compute trim states and assess their stability. This paper lays the foundation for design and stability analysis of a flapping wing aircraft that can switch rapidly from flapping to gliding flight for agile manoeuvring in a constrained environment.