Design of a Quadrotor System for an Autonomous Indoor Exploration

This paper describes the hardware components and the embedded software of a self-designed unmanned aerial system (UAS) to fulfill the task of an autonomous indoor exploration. The project, the paper is based on, was conducted at the University of Braunschweig - Institute of Technology by students and scientific researchers studying and working...

V-REP & ROS Testbed for Design, Test, and Tuning of a Quadrotor Vision Based Fuzzy Control System for Autonomous Landing

This paper focuses on the use of the Virtual Robotics Experimental Platform (V-REP) and the Robotics Operative System (ROS) working in parallel for design, test, and tuning of a vision based control system to command an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Here, is presented how to configure the V-REP, and ROS to work in parallel, and how to use the...

Lisa-S 2.8g autopilot for GPS-based flight of MAVs

Recent advances in sensor miniaturization have enabled the development of a miniaturized fully functional autopilot. In this article, the open hardware and open software Paparazzi-UAV Lisa-S micro autopilot is presented, weighing only 2.8 grams and measuring 2 by 2 centimeters. It incorporates 2-way telemetry with a ground station, a Spektrum...

Autonomous Aerial Mapping and Observation Task for IMAV2014 Competition

The IMAV2014 Competition gives an important place to computer vision and aerial mapping. This paper presents the different strategies and algorithms that have been developed in order to tackle these particular problems. The first task consists in automatically reading the digit displayed by a seven segment panel on the front wall of a building....

Sweetgum Panels: A periodic compliant mechanism for solar shading

The paper describes a novel technique for creating flat, bi-layer, compliant mechanisms for adaptive building components to be used in solar shading. Micro-actuation of these periodic, flexible devices cause innumerable three-dimensional micro-loops to erupt in the panel surface, permitting passage of diffused light while maintaining visual...

Design of polymeric capsules for autonomous healing of cracks in cementitious materials

Now, most of the capsules used to contain polymeric healing agents in self-healing concrete, are made of glass. However, glass capsules cannot be mixed in concrete and are therefore placed manually into the moulds during concrete casting in laboratory tests. This represents a major drawback for an eventual industrialisation. In this study,...

Self-healing behavior of fiber-reinforced self-healing ceramics

The alumina fiber reinforced alumina containing the interlayer of SiC as healing agent was found to have self-healing ability for the delimitation of the fiber/matrix interface. Main crack in the composite is branched to fiber/matrix interface when the main crack reached the interface, because the interlayer has lower strength than those of the...

An Architecture with Integrated Image Processing for Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents an overall MAV design with an integrated camera system. It shows the integration of the camera into the hardware and software architecture and how camera information can be used within the logical design for improving ?ight control. The presented architecture will be tested and evaluated during the International Micro Aerial...

BioMAV: Bio-inspired intelligence for autonomous ?ight

This paper aims to contribute to research on biologically inspired micro air vehicles in two ways: (i) it explores a novel repertoire of behavioral modules which can be controlled through ?nite state machines (FSM) and (ii) elementary movement detectors (EMD) are combined with a center/surround edge detection algorithm to yield improved edge...

PLASE: A Novel Planar Surface Extraction Method for the Autonomous Navigation of Micro-Air Vehicle

A planar surface extraction method is proposed for the indoor navigation of a micro-air vehicle (MAV). The algorithm finds planar clusters from the unorganized pointclouds. This is achieved by implementing a novel approach that first segments the data points into clusters and then each cluster is estimated for its planarity. The method is tested...

Closing the gap between simulation and reality in the sensor and motion models of an autonomous AR.Drone

This article describes a method to develop an advanced navigation capability for the standard platform of the IMAV indoor competition: the Parrot AR.Drone. Our development is partlybased on simulation, which requires both a re-alistic sensor and motion model. This article de-scribes how a visual map of the indoor environ-ment can be made,...