Evolution of robust high speed optical-flow-based landing for autonomous MAVs

Automatic optimization of robotic behavior has been the long-standing goal of Evolutionary Robotics. Allowing the problem at hand to be solved by automation often leads to novel approaches and new insights. A common problem encountered with this approach is that when this optimization occurs in a simulated environment, the optimized policies are...

Unsupervised Learning of a Hierarchical Spiking Neural Network for Optical Flow Estimation: From Events to Global Motion Perception

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...

A Tailless Flapping Wing MAV Performing Monocular Visual Servoing Tasks

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...

On-board communication-based relative localization for collision avoidance in Micro Air Vehicle teams

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,...

First autonomous multi-room exploration with an insect-inspired flapping wing vehicle

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...

Abstraction, Sensory-Motor Coordination, and the Reality Gap in Evolutionary Robotics

One of the major challenges of evolutionary robotics is to transfer robot controllers evolved in simulation to robots in the real world. In this article, we investigate abstraction of the sensory inputs and motor actions as a tool to tackle this problem. Abstraction in robots is simply the use of preprocessed sensory inputs and low-level closed...

Abstraction as a Mechanism to Cross the Reality Gap in Evolutionary Robotics

One of the major challenges of Evolutionary Robotics is to transfer robot controllers evolved in simulation to robots in the real world. In this article, we investigate abstraction on the sensory inputs and motor actions as a potential solution to this problem. Abstraction means that the robot uses preprocessed sensory inputs and closed loop low...

Behavior Trees for Evolutionary Robotics

Evolutionary Robotics allows robots with limited sensors and processing to tackle complex tasks by means of sensory-motor coordination. In this article we show the first application of the Behavior Tree framework on a real robotic platform using the evolutionary robotics methodology. This framework is used to improve the intelligibility of the...