University of Pennsylvania

The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania was founded in 2008. It applies computer science and engineering to research, design and construct autonomous vehicles. Its located in a $10 million high tech research facility with state-of-the-art equipment and resources. Students are eligeble to receive a Masters of Robotics degree.

UAV Research
Their UAV research project is mainly focused around autonomous navigation of unmanned air vehicles. The challenge is to design systems, which exhibit a goal-driven behavior, while sensing and reacting to changing environment. This project is a collaboration between students and faculty from  University of Pennsylvania and industry experts from Dragonfly Pictures, Inc.

Autonomous Aerial Vehicles
The Autonomous Aerial Vehicles research project is focused on creating flight control systems capable of fully autonomous navigation. The challenge is to design systems, which exhibit a goal-driven behavior, while sensing and reacting to changing environment. This project is a collaboration between students and faculty from  University of Pennsylvania and industry experts.

Micro UAVs
GRASP Lab is creating drones with the capability to navigate in, three-dimensional environments with or without GPS. Applications include search and rescue, first response and precision farming. The drones are quad-rotor platforms with onboard sensors customized for autonomous control. They use sensors that include inertial measuring units, cameras, a laser range scanner, an altimeter and a GPS sensor. The smallest drone has a mass of only 20 grams and is capable of flying at 6 m/s. The largest robot weighs nearly 2 kgs and can navigate both indoors and outdoors.

Heterogeneous Unmanned Vehicle Teams
HURT is a multi-vehicle controller that coordinates and collaboratively plans missions for autonomous vehicles. It uses augmented autonomy for teams of arbitrary vehicle platforms.

Minimum Actuator Controlled Flight
The Modular Robotics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania has been developing fully controllable UAVs that only use two motors with no actuators or servos. Traditional helicopters use a series of complex actuators to maintain control. These have been eliminated all together with this new minimalistic design. The goal of the project is to eventually develop fully controllable UAS with only one motor. This is achieved by controlling the propellers pitch with extremely short bursts of rotational velocity change in the motor.



Media
The GRASP Lab has received lots of attention from the media sparked by a series of YouTube videos that shows small quadcopters executing complex, aggressive flight maneuvers. Since then, they have been featured on numerous popular programs including TED Talks and NOVA.

Vijay Kumar Lab Videos

Other Media Sources