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.