- document
-
Li, S. (author), de Wagter, C. (author), de Visser, C.C. (author), Chu, Q. P. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)High-speed flight in GPS-denied environments is currently an important frontier in the research on autonomous flight of micro air vehicles. Autonomous drone races stimulate the advances in this area by representing a very challenging case with tight turns, texture-less floors, and dynamic spectators around the track. These properties hamper...journal article 2019
- document
-
Paredes-Vallés, Federico (author), Scheper, K.Y.W. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)The combination of spiking neural networks and event-based vision sensors holds the potential of highly efficient and high-bandwidth optical flow estimation. This paper presents the first hierarchical spiking architecture in which motion (direction and speed) selectivity emerges in an unsupervised fashion from the raw stimuli generated with an...journal article 2019
- document
-
Wijnker, Dirk (author), van Dijk, Tom (author), Snellen, M. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author), de Wagter, C. (author)To investigate how an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) can detect manned aircraft with a single microphone, an audio data set is created in which UAV ego-sound and recorded aircraft sound are mixed together. A convolutional neural network is used to perform the air traffic detection. Due to restrictions on flying UAVs close to aircraft, the data set...conference paper 2019
- document
-
Olejnik, D.A. (author), Karasek, M. (author), Duisterhof, Bart (author), Scheper, K.Y.W. (author), van Dijk, Tom (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)In the field of robotics, a major challenge is achieving high levels of autonomy with small vehicles that have limited mass and power budgets. The main motivation for designing such small vehicles is that, compared to their larger counterparts, they have the potential to be safer, and hence be available and work together in large numbers. One of...conference paper 2019
- document
-
van der Helm, Steven (author), Coppola, M. (author), McGuire, K.N. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)We present a range-based solution for indoor relative localization by micro air vehicles (MAVs), achieving sufficient accuracy for leader–follower flight. Moving forward from previous work, we removed the dependency on a common heading measurement by the MAVs, making the relative localization accuracy independent of magnetometer readings. We...journal article 2019
- document
-
Kajak, K. M. (author), Karasek, M. (author), Chu, Q. P. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)Recently, several insect- and hummingbird-inspired tailless flapping wing robots have been introduced. However, their flight dynamics, which are likely to be similar to that of their biological counterparts, remain yet to be fully understood. We propose a minimal dynamic model that is not only validated with experimental data, but also able...journal article 2019
- document
-
Coppola, M. (author), Guo, J. (author), Gill, E.K.A. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)This work proposes PageRank as a tool to evaluate and optimize the global performance of a swarm based on the analysis of the local behavior of a single robot. PageRank is a graph centrality measure that assesses the importance of nodes based on how likely they are to be reached when traversing a graph. We relate this, using a microscopic...journal article 2019
- document
-
Karasek, M. (author), Perçin, M. (author), Cunis, Torbjørn (author), van Oudheusden, B.W. (author), de Wagter, C. (author), Remes, B.D.W. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)Flow visualisations are essential to better understand the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight. The issues inherent to animal experiments, such as poor controllability and unnatural flapping when tethered, can be avoided by using robotic flyers that promise for a more systematic and repeatable methodology. Here, we present a new...journal article 2019
- document
-
Coppola, Mario (author), Guo, J. (author), Gill, E.K.A. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)In this paper we present a procedure to automatically design and verify the local behavior of robots with highly limited cognition. All robots are: anonymous, homogeneous, non-communicating, memoryless, reactive, do not know their global position, do not have global state information, and operate by a local clock. They only know: (1) the...journal article 2019
- document
- de Wagter, C. (author), Karasek, M. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author) journal article 2018
- document
-
Karasek, M. (author), Muijres, Florian T. (author), de Wagter, C. (author), Remes, B.D.W. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)Insects are among the most agile natural flyers.Hypotheses on their flight control cannot always be validated by experiments with animals or tethered robots.To this end, we developed a programmable and agile autonomous free-flying robot controlled through bio-inspired motion changes of its flapping wings.Despite being 55 times the size of a...journal article 2018
- document
-
Tijmons, S. (author), de Wagter, C. (author), Remes, B.D.W. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)Autonomous flight of Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles (FWMAVs) is a major challenge in the field of robotics, due to their light weight and their flapping-induced body motions. An FWMAV is presented weighing a mere 20 g while all its sensors and processing for autonomous flight are onboard. The navigation is based on a 4-g stereo vision camera...journal article 2018
- document
-
van Dalen, G.J.J. (author), McGuire, K.N. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)Autonomous navigation is a major challenge in the development of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Especially, when an algorithm has to be efficient, insect intelligence can be a source of inspiration. One of the elementary navigation tasks of insects and robots is “homing”, which is the task of returning to an initial starting position. A promising...journal article 2018
- document
-
Smeur, E.J.J. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author), Chu, Q. P. (author)This paper presents the cascaded integration of Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) for attitude control and INDI for position control of micro air vehicles. Significant improvements over a traditional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller are demonstrated in an experiment where the quadrotor flies in and out of a 10 m...journal article 2018
- document
-
Braber, T.I. (author), de Wagter, C. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author), Babuska, R. (author)This article presents an adaptive control strategy to stabilize a micro quadrotor in all three axes using only an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for the attitude control and a monocular camera for canceling position drift. The proposed control scheme automatically determines the appropriate optical flow control gains. This is achieved by...conference paper 2018
- document
-
Duisterhof, Bart (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)In the field of robotics, a major challenge is extending the flight range of micro aerial vehicles. One way to extend the range is by charging batteries with solar arrays on the ground, while resting on intermediate landing positions. The solution we propose in this study differentiates itself from other solutions as it does not focus on...conference paper 2018
- document
-
Olejnik, D.A. (author), Sujit, A. (author), Karasek, M. (author), Remes, B.D.W. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)During flight, natural fliers flap, twist and bend their wings to enhance flight performance. Lift and thrust benefit from flexibility as well as from both passive and active wing deformation. At the same time, the active deformations are used for flight control. In this study, we investigate strategies of control moments generation in a bio...conference paper 2018
- document
-
Coppola, M. (author), McGuire, K.N. (author), Scheper, K.Y.W. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)To avoid collisions, Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) flying in teams require estimates of their relative locations, preferably with minimal mass and processing burden. We present a relative localization method where MAVs need only to communicate with each other using their wireless transceiver. The MAVs exchange on-board states (velocity, height,...journal article 2018
- document
-
van Hecke, K.G. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author), van der Maaten, L.J.P. (author), Hennes, Daniel (author), Izzo, Dario (author)Self-supervised learning is a reliable learning mechanism in which a robot uses an original, trusted sensor cue for training to recognize an additional, complementary sensor cue. We study for the first time in self-supervised learning how a robot’s learning behavior should be organized, so that the robot can keep performing its task in the...journal article 2018
- document
-
Scheper, K.Y.W. (author), Karasek, M. (author), de Wagter, C. (author), Remes, B.D.W. (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author)One of the emerging tasks for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) is autonomous indoor navigation. While commonly employed platforms for such tasks are micro-quadrotors, insectinspired flapping wing MAVs can offer many advantages, such<br/>as being inherently safe due to their low inertia, reciprocating wings bouncing of objects or potentially lower noise...conference paper 2018