Self-supervised monocular distance learning on a lightweight micro air vehicle

Obstacle detection by monocular vision is challenging because a single camera does not provide a direct measure for absolute distances to objects. A self-supervised learning approach is proposed that combines a camera and a very small short-range proximity sensor to find the relation between the appearance of objects in camera images and their...

Autonomous Flight of Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles

Many types of drones have emerged over the last decade and new applications in various sectors are announced almost on a daily basis. In scientific literature, small drones are called Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Especially very small MAVs will play a significant role in indoor applications, since their small size allows them to navigate in narrow...

MAVLAB; competing with Micro Air Vehicles (MAV)

The IMAV is an annual international conference and competition involving Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). In September, the 2013 edition was held in Toulouse, France. The MAVLab from the faculty of Aerospace Engineering, TU Delft joined the competition with a group of thirteen students (MSc/PhD) and sta! members. The goal was not only to win the...

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...

Autonomous Door and Corridor Traversal with a 20-Gram Flapping Wing MAV by Onboard Stereo Vision

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...

Stereo Vision for Flapping Wing MAVs: Design of an Obstacle Avoidance system

In the field of Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) research the use of flapping wings attracts a lot of interest. The potential of flapping wings lies in their efficiency at small scales and their large flight envelope with a single configuration. They have the possibility of performing both energy efficient long distance flights as well as hovering...