Hybrid Flying-Crawling Quadrotors (HyFCQs) are transformable robots with the ability of terrestrial and aerial hybrid motion. This article presents a motion planning and control framework designed for HyFCQs. A kinodynamic path-searching method with the crawling limitation of HyFCQs is proposed to guarantee the dynamical feasibility of trajectories. Subsequently, a hierarchical motion controller is designed to map the execution of the flight autopilot to both crawling and flying modes. Considering the distinct driving methods for crawling and flying, we introduce a motion state machine for autonomous locomotion regulation. Real-world experiments in diverse scenarios validate the exceptional performance of the proposed approach.
Morphing quadrotors with four external actuators can adapt to different restricted scenarios by changing their geometric structure. However, previous works mainly focus on the improvements in structures and controllers, and existing planning algorithms don't consider the morphological modifications, which leads to safety and dynamic feasibility issues. In this paper, we propose a unified planning and control framework for morphing quadrotors to deform autonomously and efficiently. The framework consists of a milliseconds-level spatial-temporal trajectory optimizer that takes into account the morphological modifications of quadrotors. The optimizer can generate full-body safety trajectories including position and attitude. Additionally, it incorporates a nonlinear attitude controller that accounts for aerodynamic drag and dynamically adjusts dynamic parameters such as the inertia tensor and Center of Gravity. The controller can also online compute the thrust coefficient during morphing. Benchmark experiments compared with existing methods validate the robustness of the proposed controller. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Most nighttime semantic segmentation studies are based on domain adaptation approaches and image input. However, limited by the low dynamic range of conventional cameras, images fail to capture structural details and boundary information in low-light conditions. Event cameras, as a new form of vision sensors, are complementary to conventional cameras with their high dynamic range. To this end, we propose a novel unsupervised Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation (CMDA) framework to leverage multi-modality (Images and Events) information for nighttime semantic segmentation, with only labels on daytime images. In CMDA, we design the Image Motion-Extractor to extract motion information and the Image Content-Extractor to extract content information from images, in order to bridge the gap between different modalities (Images to Events) and domains (Day to Night). Besides, we introduce the first image-event nighttime semantic segmentation dataset. Extensive experiments on both the public image dataset and the proposed image-event dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We open-source our code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/XiaRho/CMDA.