This paper details a novel approach to collision avoidance for aerial vehicles that enables high-speed flight in uncertain environments. This framework is applied at the controller level and provides safety regardless of the planner that is used. The method is shown to be robust to state uncertainty and disturbances, and is computed entirely online utilizing the full nonlinear system dynamics. The effectiveness of this method is shown in a high-fidelity simulation of a quadrotor with onboard sensors rapidly and safely exploring a cave environment utilizing a simple planner.

Future manufacturing environments will see an increased need for cooperation between humans and machines. In this paper we propose a method that allows industrial manipulators to safely operate around humans. This approach guarantees that the manipulator will never collide with human operators while performing its normal tasks. This is done in an near-optimal way by considering how forward reachable sets of human operators grow with time, and by continuously updating these reachable sets based on current position estimates of the operators near the robot. An implicit active set invariance filter is then used to constrain the system-in a minimally invasive way-to stay in the complement of that forward reachable set. We demonstrate this approach in simulation on an industrial robotic arm: the ABB IRB 6640.

This paper presents the first experimental results of crutch-less dynamic walking with paraplegics on a lower-body exoskeleton: ATALANTE, designed by the French start-up company Wandercraft. The methodology used to achieve these results is based on the partial hybrid zero dynamics (PHZD) framework for formally generating stable walking gaits. A direct collocation optimization formulation is used to provide fast and efficient generation of gaits tailored to each patient. These gaits are then implemented on the exoskeleton for three paraplegics. The end result is dynamically stable walking in an exoskeleton without the need for crutches. After a short period of tuning by the engineers and practice by the subjects, each subject was able to dynamically walk across a room of about 10 m up to a speed of 0.15 m/s (0.5 km/h) without the need for crutches or any other kind of assistance.