Our lab focuses on novel theories and applications of robotic systems, especially multi-robot systems. We are interested in next-generation robotic systems that are interesting, meaningful, and challenging to study.

Robotic swarming systems

There are many interesting collective behaviors in biological systems in nature such as flocking of birds and schools of fish. Through simple local interactions among individuals, complex and fascinating collective behaviors emerge. We have been studying the fundamental local interaction mechanisms of swarming systems, developing real-world robotic swarming platforms, and applying them to solve real challenging tasks (see the figures below).

Aerial target sensing and pursuit

Different from many existing tasks of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), we have been studying the task of aerial target pursuit, where multiple MAVs use their onboard cameras to detect, localize, and then pursue another flying target MAV. This task was originally motivated by the interesting bird-catching-bird behavior in nature. Since the target MAV is uncooperative, this task involves many interesting research problems such as vision-based MAV detection, motion estimation, and cooperative control. In addition to new algorithms, we have been developing high-performance MAV platforms to verify the proposed algorithms. The following figure shows some research topics that we have been studying.

Aerial robotic manipulation

Nowadays, MAVs are mainly used to "see": that is to sense the environment. We are more interested in using MAVs to "do": that is to interact with the environment through robotic manipulation. We have been studying aerial robotic manipulation systems, which combine multirotor MAVs with high-degree-of-freedom robotic arms. They are next-generation robots that can fly quickly in a large area and in the meantime realize precise manipulation through the robotic arm. We have been studying new sensing, estimation, and control algorithms for aerial manipulation. We have also been developing prototype platforms to realize the proposed algorithms (see the figures below).