Cooperative Flight: Towards Autonomous Multi-Agent Aerial Transportation

Dimitrios Chaikalis
| September 27th 2022 – 11 am, NYUAD C1 (ERB) -045 |

Aerial transportation and delivery has attracted the attention of academics in the robotics community in the past decade. Nowadays, with big tech industries overtaking most of the developments in automated drone delivery research, academic interest is shifting towards collaborative and modular flight, where aerial robots can combine with each other to complete tasks deemed too complex or infeasible for a single agent.

Our research has so far spanned two sub-genres of this area of study.

• The first is collaborative flight for the purpose of flight-as-a-unit, where autonomous agents are modularly attached on packages to be transported, then manage to operate as parts of a single larger vehicle, flying autonomously in unison.
• The second part is collaboration among autonomous aerial workers, vehicles equipped with robotic arms, allowing for increased dexterity when co-manipulating a package. This results in a more complex system, but with increased capabilities regarding adaptation, obstacle avoidance and dynamic interactions.

Speaker’s Bio

Dimitrios Chaikalis is a Ph.D. student at NYU Abu Dhabi. He earned his Integrated Masters diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Patras, Greece. His research interests revolve around robotics and autonomous vehicles, with a special focus on the analysis, modeling, and control of Unmanned Aerial Systems and their applications, as well as working towards increasing autonomy and cooperation capabilities in aerial robots.