Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2103.04709

Design, Optimal Guidance and Control of a Low-cost Re-usable Electric Model Rocket

Lukas Spannagl·Elias Hampp·Andrea Carron·Jerome Sieber·Carlo Alberto Pascucci·Aldo U. Zgraggen·Alexander Domahidi·Melanie N. Zeilinger
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In the last decade, autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles have become increasingly important as they lower mission costs thanks to their re-usability. However, their development is complex, rendering even the basic experimental validation of the required advanced guidance and control (G & C) algorithms prohibitively time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we present the design of an inexpensive small-scale VTOL platform that can be built from off-the-shelf components for less than 1000 USD. The vehicle design mimics the first stage of a reusable launcher, making it a perfect test-bed for G & C algorithms. To control the vehicle during ascent and descent, we propose a real-time optimization-based G & C algorithm. The key features are a real-time minimum fuel and free-final-time optimal guidance combined with an offset-free tracking model predictive position controller. The vehicle hardware design and the G & C algorithm are experimentally validated both indoors and outdoor, showing reliable operation in a fully autonomous fashion with all computations done on-board and in real-time.

Explore related subjects

cs.RO

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Lukas Spannagl, Elias Hampp, Andrea Carron, Jerome Sieber, Carlo Alberto Pascucci, Aldo U. Zgraggen, Alexander Domahidi, Melanie N. Zeilinger. 2021-03-08. Design, Optimal Guidance and Control of a Low-cost Re-usable Electric Model Rocket. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.04709

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in $\pi_{0.5}$. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to $\pi_{0.5}$, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains $\pi_{0.5}$'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming $\pi_{0.5}$ on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

ObstaDiff: Generalizable Diffusion Policy Learning via Obstacle-aware Representations

Imitation learning has achieved impressive results in robotic manipulation, yet most existing approaches assume clean backgrounds and lack explicit mechanisms for obstacle-aware motion generation. Extending such policies to cluttered, real-world scenes with unstructured obstacles remains a key generalization challenge. We present ObstaDiff, a decomposed diffusion-policy framework with a lightweight obstacle-aware visual encoder. ObstaDiff extracts a structured target-obstacle-background representation, enabling the downstream alignment policy to generate end-effector trajectories toward a target-centered bottleneck pose while reasoning about surrounding obstacles. We evaluate ObstaDiff on 61 real-robot greenhouse trials per method (366 executions in total). ObstaDiff achieves 75.41% average task success and 8.20% average obstacle collision rate, outperforming representative imitation-learning baselines and improving generalization in cluttered agricultural scenes.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Testing Between the Test Cases: Proving End-to-End Steering in Conditions You Never Drove

AI-based automated vehicle testing is challenging because a model that passes every test condition can still fail in the real world. Formal verification offers a way to directly address this gap. On a simulated highway and an arterial road we trained two small end-to-end steering networks each in CARLA, one on clear conditions alone and one on clear, fog, night and low sun. All four models were driven against a 2.19 ft lane-departure budget. Without driving again, we used bound propagation, a formal method that reads the trained weights, to compute how far steering can drift at every disturbance strength between two captured images. One calculation covers more than a campaign could drive: on the arterial it spans 133 poses, where ten intensities each would be 10^133 combinations, in minutes on one GPU. Not only did formal verification find conditions that broke the clear-trained policy without simulation testing, it provided some preliminary evidence for potential failures between the test cases. Our overall conclusion is that formal verification is a viable complement to simulation, and could be adopted as a part of verification and validation for automated driving.

cs.RO↗