This work deals with the problem of unlocking perpetual deployment capabilities for small-UAS robotics across the diverse settings of the real world and their challenges, encompassing considerations for marine environments alongside the more common terrestrial ones. Via the progress made within this scope, a step towards truly ubiquitous and selfsustainable aerial robotics is accomplished. The work consists of the development of the Gannet Solar-VTOL, a waterproof small-UAS that is capable of resting on the surface of water for prolonged periods of time and over varying temperature ranges, while harvesting solar power to recharge itself. Equally importantly, it integrates a field-proven Self-Sustainable Autonomous System architecture that allows it to hibernate and sustain its battery charge overnight or during periods of solar illumination scarcity, as well as to assess mission-critical parameters (e.g., water surface turbulence, ambient temperature of battery compartment) on the low-power side of the Power Management Stack, and react appropriately. Finally, the robot is equipped with an onboard camera and a Neural Processing Unit that allows it to perform in-field environmental monitoring operations (e.g., wildfire detection). This paper experimentally demonstrates the aforementioned capabilities, and concludes with a presentation of the amphibious small-UAS' long-term deployment within a marine environment in the N. Nevada region, spanning over 3 consecutive days.

This works deals with the problem of long-term autonomy in the context of multi-day field deployments of Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) systems. To truly depart from the necessity for human intervention for the crucial task of providing battery recharging, and to liberate from the need to operate in a confined range around specially installed infrastructure such as recharging pods, the MAV robot is required to harvest power on its own, but equally importantly also sustain prolonged periods of ambient power scarcity. This implies being able to sustain the battery charge overnight when using solar recharging, or even during multiple days of illumination inadequacy (e.g., due to degraded atmospheric lucidity and heavy overcast). We address this by presenting a Self-Sustainable Autonomous System architecture for MAVs centered around a specially tailored Power Management Stack, which is capable of achieving deep system hibernation, a feature that facilitates the aforementioned functionalities. We present a) continuous, b) multi-day successive, and c) externally-powered recharging that uses a legged robot-mounted Mobile Recharging Station. We conclude by demonstrating a challenging zero-intervention multi-day field deployment mission in the N.Nevada region.

This work presents a novel Aspect Ratio-Modular Vertical Take-Off and Landing (ARM-VTOL) aerial robot, which is a meta-aircraft composed of two or more TiltRotor hybrid aircraft systems capable of magnetically being coupled during hovering flight, and of executing VTOL / Fixed-Wing hybrid missions once combined. The proposed meta-aircraft system carries the advantage of improved aerodynamic efficiency due its increased cumulative planform aspect ratio, which can be leveraged to achieve prolonged flight times in collaborative multi-vehicle flight. We propose an extendable methodology for its control which relies on the multi-body equivalent dynamics, and we present the coupling mechanism design that facilitates its experimental demonstration. We accompany these contributions with a field test-driven evaluation study conducted with a bi-vehicle ARM-VTOL prototype. The presented sequence includes vehicle-to-vehicle magnetic coupling during hovering flight, and is followed by a combined-vehicle mission comprising vertical climb, VTOL-forward transition, fixed-wing flight and maneuvering, and reverse-transition to VTOL and landing.

This paper presents a novel strategy for intelligent robotic environment reconfiguration applied to overcome mobility constraints with an autonomously exploring mobile manipulation system. A realistic problem arising during exploration of unknown challenging environments is the encountering of untraversable areas –given the robot’s mobility constraints– resulting in the robot getting stuck. We propose that given manipulation capabilities of an autonomous system, it should be possible to leverage loose entities in its surrounding to reconfigure its environment, and therefore potentially restore traversability to an unreachable region. This work’s contribution is two-fold: first, it proposes a mid-range traversability estimation graph-based backend which also allows early detection of terrain gaps, and secondly, it provides an algorithm for focused environment alteration that ensures stable and valid configurations. The plans of this generic policy are evaluated to decide if they resolve the robot’s problem, and are subsequently applied. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated via experimental studies using a relevant autonomous system within a mobility-constrained mock-up environment.

This paper presents a novel strategy for the autonomous deployment of Micro Aerial Vehicle scouts through constricted aperture-like ingress points, by narrowly fitting and launching them with a high-precision Mobile Manipulation robot. A significant problem during exploration and reconnaissance into highly unstructured environments, such as indoor collapsed ones, is the encountering of impassable areas due to their constricted and rigid nature. We propose that a heterogeneous robotic system-of-systems armed with manipulation capabilities while also ferrying a fleet of microsized aerial agents, can deploy the latter through constricted apertures that marginally fit them in size, thus allowing them to act as scouts and resume the reconnaissance mission. This work’s contribution is twofold: first, it proposes active-vision based aperture detection to locate candidate ingress points and a hierarchical search-based aperture profile analysis to position a MAV’s body through them, and secondly it presents and experimentally demonstrates the novelty of a system-of-systems approach which leverages mobile manipulation to deploy other robots which are otherwise incapable of entering through extremely narrow openings.