Title: Aerospace Robotics: From Agile Aerial Transportation to Interstellar Travel

Abstract: In the last decade, the field of aerial robotics has experienced fast-growth especially for the case of multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). High-performance micro-scale processors and high-efficiency sensors have helped to increase the commercial scope of these flying robots. Possibly the most common multi-rotor aerial platform nowadays is the quadrotor. This simple machine which consists of four individual rotors attached to a rigid cross frame has better 3-D mobility than fixed-wing UAVs. Its ability for vertical takeoff and landing, for hovering while changing its heading, and for flying ahead or laterally with the possibility of varying its height have opened a wide spectrum of applications ranging from persistent surveillance to interaction with external objects. Amongst such applications, aerial load transportation has attracted the attention of several research groups worldwide. Indeed, the quadrotor has become a standard platform for aerial manipulation research thanks to its payload capacity, flight endurance, and low-cost experimentation. In this seminar, I discuss some challenges of using aerial robots to transport suspended loads safely and efficiently. I provide insight into problems that can arise in aerial transportation and suggests techniques from a wide range of control algorithms in order to solve them. In the last part of the presentation, I briefly describe the stability problem of a light sail riding on a laser beam in the context of the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative.

Bio
Rafael Fierro (rfierro@unm.edu) is a Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University of New Mexico where he has been since 2007. He received an MSc. degree in control engineering from the University of Bradford, England and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington. Prior to joining UNM, he held a postdoctoral appointment with the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty position with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University. His current research interests include cyber-physical systems and robotic networks; coordination and planning in heterogeneous multi-agent systems; unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV); and hybrid and switched systems. The US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), Department of Energy (DOE), National Science Foundation (NSF), and Sandia National Laboratories have funded his research. He directs the Multi-Agent, Robotics, and Heterogeneous Systems (MARHES) Laboratory. Dr. Fierro was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, a 2004 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the 2008 International Society of Automation (ISA) Transactions Best Paper Award. He has served as associate editor for the Journal of Intelligent and Robotics Systems, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, and IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems T-CNS. Currently, he is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering T-ASE.

Bienvenue à tous!