The development and testing of advanced aerial robots require experiments in controlled environments with tailored airflow profiles. This paper presents an online learning algorithm for controlling the complex airflow field in a multi-fan vertical wind tunnel.
arXiv:2608. 03378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development and testing of advanced aerial robots require experiments in controlled environments with tailored airflow profiles.
FALCON‑S is a modular, high‑fidelity simulator designed for fixed‑wing aerial robots operating near the ground. It models full 6DoF rigid‑body physics, semi‑empirical ground‑effect aerodynamics, actuator dynamics, sensor noise, and environmental disturbances, and supports both CPU and GPU backends via Torch and NVIDIA Warp for large‑scale reinforcement learning and optimal control. The framework offers a unified interface for various controllers, including RL and optical control algorithms, and allows cross‑validation with X‑Plane and JSBSim for engineering integration and visual fidelity.
arXiv:2510. 21874v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in dynamic wind fields must generate safe and energy-efficient trajectories under physical and environmental constraints.
arXiv:2606. 01478v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-quality, large-scale synthetic data from simulations is becoming a cornerstone for pushing the capabilities of robot algorithms.
The paper presents a curriculum‑based adversarial heterogeneous agent reinforcement learning (HARL‑AC) approach for autonomous quad‑copter landing on a ship deck in maritime settings. Using Heterogeneous‑Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (HAPPO) in NVIDIA Isaac Lab, the authors train a cooperative control policy that outperforms domain‑randomized baselines, achieving up to 97.5% success on in‑distribution sea states and higher median success and lower crash rates on out‑of‑distribution sea states. The adversarially trained policy also exhibits more cautious behavior, slightly increasing timeouts but improving safety in severe, unseen conditions.
arXiv:2607. 01528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small multirotor aircraft are increasingly tasked with operations in the atmospheric boundary layer, where turbulent winds comparable to the vehicle's airspeed degrade trajectory tracking and can defeat conventional feedback control.
arXiv:2606. 03252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Navigating a drone in unseen and cluttered environments requires reliable generalization to unseen scene layouts and understanding of environmental structure relative to the robot's capabilities.
arXiv:2609.36915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Aerial manipulators extend robotic manipulation into 3D workspaces that are difficult for ground-based robots to access, creating new opportunities f...
arXiv:2603.26687v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hybrid aerial--ground robots can use thrust to cross obstacles that impede wheel-driven motion, but deciding how much thrust to apply during...
The paper introduces VLN on the Fly, an onboard vision‑language navigation stack for aerial robots that separates grounding, planning, and control into inspectable stages. A quantized vision‑language model grounds instructions to a coarse image cell, depth estimation lifts this to a 3D goal, a fast B‑spline planner generates a feasible trajectory, and a pretrained reinforcement learning policy translates the trajectory into motor commands. In controlled indoor flights, the stack achieved the target in 13 of 15 trials with a mean goal error of 5.72 cm and 39.3% GPU utilization, and successfully tracked collision‑free trajectories in cluttered environments.
arXiv:2509. 10247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This letter introduces DiffAero, a lightweight, GPU-accelerated, and fully differentiable simulation framework designed for efficient quadrotor control policy learning.
arXiv:2606. 10857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a generalist position control policy capable of controlling arbitrary multirotor configurations of a certain rotor count (e.