Aerial Robotics

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Overview

Aerial robotics develops flying machines—from multirotors and fixed-wing aircraft to flapping-wing and hybrid robots—and the methods that let them sense, move, and interact with the world. Work combines onboard perception and state estimation with model-based planning and control, including model predictive control, visual servoing, and robust control; reinforcement learning and vision-language-action models are increasingly used for navigation, tracking, and manipulation. Researchers also study cooperative swarms, aerial transport, landing, and contact tasks, evaluating systems in simulation and benchmarks as well as on real robots with limited power, computing, and sensing. A central challenge is making learning-based autonomy generalize from simulation to changing real conditions while preserving safety, reliability, and real-time performance.

Latest papers

CardsList

343 papers38 papers in the last four weeks, down 24% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Temporal Cascading of Planning and Control for Quadrotor MPC

    Dec 13, 2025Rudolf Reiter, Chao Qin, Leonard Bauersfeld +1Robot Trajectory TrackingAerial Robotics

    Robotics and Perception Group, Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Andreasstrasse 15, 8050 Zurich, Switzerland · Institute for Aerospace Studies, University of Toronto, 4925 Dufferin Street, Toronto, ON M3H 5T6, Canada

  2. Wake Vectoring for Efficient Morphing Flight

    Dec 4, 2025Ioannis Mandralis, Severin Schumacher, Morteza GharibAerial Robotics

    Department of Aerospace Engineering, California Institute of Technology · Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, California Institute of Technology

  3. AERMANI-VLM: Structured Prompting and Reasoning for Aerial Manipulation with Vision Language Models

    Nov 3, 2025Sarthak Mishra, Rishabh Dev Yadav, Avirup Das +3Aerial RoboticsStructured Prompting

    Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India · Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK · Newcastle University, UK

  4. Whisker-based Tactile Flight for Tiny Drones

    Oct 3, 2025Chaoxiang Ye, Guido de Croon, Salua HamazaAerial RoboticsTactile Sensing

    BioMorphic Intelligence Lab, Department of Control & Operations, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, TU Delft, The Netherlands · Micro Air Vehicle Lab, Department of Control & Operations, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, TU Delft, The Netherlands

  5. TransforMARS: Fault-Tolerant Self-Reconfiguration for Arbitrarily Shaped Modular Aerial Robot Systems

    Sep 17, 2025Rui Huang, Zhiyu Gao, Siyu Tang +4Multi-Robot Motion PlanningAerial Robotics

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117583 · Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117583

  6. Neural 3D Object Reconstruction with Small-Scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

    Sep 15, 2025Àlmos Veres-Vitàlyos, Filip Lemic, Daniel Johannes Bugelnig +5Aerial Robotics3D Reconstruction

    i2CAT Foundation, Spain · Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia · University of Klagenfurt, Austria +3

  7. Autonomous Close-Proximity Photovoltaic Panel Coating Using a Quadcopter

    Sep 13, 2025Dimitri Jacquemont, Carlo Bosio, Teaya Yang +7Aerial RoboticsQuadrotor Control

    High Performance Robotics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California Berkeley, CA 94720, United States

  8. First Experimental Demonstration of Natural Hovering Extremum Seeking: A New Paradigm in Flapping Flight Physics

    Aug 28, 2025Simone Martini, Rohan Palanikumar, Ahmed A. Elgohary +1Aerial RoboticsFeedback Control

    Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, USA

  9. Learning Acrobatic Flight from Preferences

    Aug 26, 2025Colin Merk, Ismail Geles, Jiaxu Xing +3RL for RoboticsAerial Robotics

    Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich, Switzerland · Autonomous Learning and Predictive Intelligence Lab, University of Zurich, Switzerland

  10. Design optimization and robustness analysis of rigid-link flapping mechanisms

    Mar 27, 2025Shyam Sunder Nishad, Anupam SaxenaAerial RoboticsMechanism Design

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Kanpur, India 208016.

  11. FLOAT Drone: A Fully-actuated Coaxial Aerial Robot for Close-Proximity Operations

    Mar 2, 2025Junxiao Lin, Shuhang Ji, Yuze Wu +3Aerial RoboticsAerial Manipulation

    State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

  12. On the Use of AI-Driven Immersive Digital Technologies for Designing and Operating UAVs

    Jul 23, 2024Yousef Emami, Mohammadhossein Homaei, Miguel Gutierrez Gaitan +2Aerial RoboticsDigital Twins

  13. An Optimal Algorithm for Changing from Latitudinal to Longitudinal Formation of Autonomous Aircraft Squadrons

    Dec 1, 2017Paulo André Sperandio Giacomin, Elder Moreira HemerlyMulti-Robot Formation ControlAerial Robotics

    Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz Departamento de Ciências Exatas e Tecnológicas - Área de Informática Ilhéus-BA, Brasil · Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica Departamento de Sistemas e Controle - Divisão de Engenharia Eletrônica São José dos Campos-SP, Brasil