The ACDS lab is collaborating with NASA Langley Research Center and is also involved on a NASA University Leadership Initiative sponsored project on Urban Aerial Mobility. The lab is responsible for the development of robust vision-based navigation algorithms for UAM vehicles as well as for the development of trajectory optimization algorithms for vehicles with hybrid, multi-modal dynamics and complex dynamics. Representative works in this area are our paper on Parametric Differential Dynamic Programming This work is in collaboration with researchers in NASA Langley Research Center and was first published in RSS 2022.

Parametric DDP in action for a take-off task with the NASA UAM Vehicle. PDDP simultaneously optimizes for control variables as well as the switching times between vertical lift and fix-wind flight.