Self-Supervised Neuromorphic Perception for Autonomous Flying Robots

In the ever-evolving landscape of robotics, the quest for advanced synthetic machines that seamlessly integrate with human lives and society becomes increasingly paramount. At the heart of this pursuit lies the intrinsic need for these machines to perceive, understand, and navigate their surroundings autonomously. Among the senses, vision...

Efficient Visual Ego-Motion Estimation for Agile Flying Robots

Micro air vehicles (MAVs) have shown significant potential in modern society. The development in robotics and automation is changing the roles of MAVs from remotely controlled machines requiring human pilots to autonomous and intelligent robots. There is an increasing number of autonomous MAVs involved in outdoor operations. In contrast, the...

Hover and fast flight of minimum-mass mission-capable flying robots

Highly automated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or "flying robots" are rapidly becoming an important asset to society. The last decade has seen the advent of an impressive number of new UAV types and applications. For many applications, the UAVs need to be safe, highly automated, and versatile. Safety is a prerequisite to allowing their use in...

Autonomous Swarms of Tiny Flying Robots

In the last decade, the research field of aerial swarms has grown at a rapid pace. These multi-robot systems possess desirable abilities including mobility in 3D spaces, efficient task execution in parallel, and redundant characteristics for fault tolerance. Many applications with multiple flying robots have already been demonstrated, such as...

Automatic Design of Verifiable Robot Swarms

The paradigm of swarm robotics aims to enable several independent robots to collaborate together toward collective goals. The distributed nature of a swarm, whereby each robot acts independently in accordance with its perceived environment, is expected to provide the system with a high degree of flexibility, robustness, and scalability. However,...

Quadrotor Fault Tolerant Flight Control and Aerodynamic Model Identification

As Multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, are gradually becoming more popular in civilian applications, the safety of these flying machines becomes a significant concern. Such drones are powered by multiple rotors to generate lift and control torques. Hence, the failure of rotors can severely threaten their flying safety. Direct...

Visual Navigation and Optimal Control for Autonomous Drone Racing

Drones, especially quadrotors, have shown their great value for applications like aerial photography, object delivery and warehouse inspection. At the same time, with the de- velopment of Artificial Intelligence (AI), computers can replace humans and even per- form better than humans in some areas where it was impossible before like the AI pro-...

Indoor swarm exploration with Pocket Drones

Pocket drones, weighing less than 50 grams, are small, agile and inherently safe. This makes them suitable for several surveillance tasks such as search and rescue, green-house monitoring and pipe-line inspection. In order for a more efficient search, a swarm of pocket drones would be ideal to explore these types of areas faster. Current methods...

Abstraction as a Tool to Bridge the Reality Gap in Evolutionary Robotics

Automatically optimizing robotic behavior to solve complex tasks has been one of<br/>the main, long-standing goals of Evolutionary Robotics (ER). When successful, this<br/>approach will likely fundamentally change the rate of development and deployment<br/>of robots in everyday life. Performing this optimization on real robots can be risky<br/...

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...