Research

AERA research projects explore all aspects of fast and agile navigation, ranging from theory to applications, from motion planning to perception, from algorithms to hardware!

Tracking Aggressive Trajectories

Aggressive trajectories involve agile flight at high speeds. Accurately tracking such trajectories is an important robotics and control systems challenge that is relevant to many applications, such as collision avoidance systems, and autonomous search and rescue drones.

Perception-aware Motion Planning

This project studies the foundations of perception-aware planning, resulting in decision-making algorithms that optimize perception objectives. For instance, this video shows the modified yaw angle to optimize visual-inertial state estimation performance.

Precision Fixed-Wing Flight Control

Fixed-wing VTOL aircraft combine efficient high-speed forward flight with the capability to take-off and land vertically and hover in place. We present novel algorithms for trajectory generation and flight control that enable these vehicles to perform aggressive aerobatics maneuvers

Collaborative High-speed Flight

Collaboration during high-speed motion may be essential for sensing and data gathering. In this case, vehicles must arrive at given waypoints all at the same time and avoid collisions with obstacles and each other; otherwise, they are free to choose their own trajectories.

Robust 6D Object Pose Estimation

Pose estimation is critical in many robotics applications, particularly to enable autonomous vehicles to perceive other vehicles around them. We design algorithms that allow 6D pose estimation in challenging scenarios, including heavy occlusion, while under computational constraints.

Multi-fidelity Trajectory Optimization

Most autonomous vehicles exhibit very complex dynamics at high speeds. This project utilizes data-driven approaches to design very fast trajectories, accounting for these factors by optimizing for them during a set of carefully selected experiments.