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,...

Obstacle Detection and Avoidance onboard an MAV using a Monocular Event-based Camera

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are able to support humans in dangerous operations, such as search and rescue operations at night on unknown terrain. These scenes require a great amount of autonomy from the MAV, as they are often radio and GPS-denied. As MAVs have limited computational resources and energy storage, onboard navigation tasks have to be...

Time-Optimal Control for Tiny Quadcopters

Time-optimal model-predictive control is essential in achieving fast and adaptive quadcopter flight. Due to the limited computational performance of onboard hardware, aggressive flight approaches have relied on off-line trajectory optimization processes or non time-optimal methods. In this work we propose a computational efficient model...

A Survey on Swarming With Micro Air Vehicles: Fundamental Challenges and Constraints

This work presents a review and discussion of the challenges that must be solved in order to successfully develop swarms of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) for real world operations. From the discussion, we extract constraints and links that relate the local level MAV capabilities to the global operations of the swarm. These should be taken into...

Evolved Neuromorphic Control for High Speed Divergence-based Landings of MAVs

Flying insects are capable of autonomous vision-based navigation in cluttered environments, reliably avoiding objects through fast and agile manoeuvres. Meanwhile, insect-scale micro air vehicles still lag far behind their biological counterparts, displaying inferior performance at a fraction of the energy efficiency. In light of this, it is in...

Design of a Flapping Wing for Application in a Micro Air Vehicle

The goal of this study is to understand the processes and wing characteristics that influence lift generation of a flapping wing, and apply the acquired knowledge in an optimization setting to obtain an optimal wing thickness distribution which maximizes effective wing lift. To achieve this, an extensive literature survey was conducted to...

Accurate position control of a flapping-wing robot enabling free-flight flow visualisation in a wind tunnel

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...

A minimal longitudinal dynamic model of a tailless flapping wing robot for control design

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...

Multi-robot formation control and object transport in dynamic environments via constrained optimization

We present a constrained optimization method for multi-robot formation control in dynamic environments, where the robots adjust the parameters of the formation, such as size and three-dimensional orientation, to avoid collisions with static and moving obstacles, and to make progress towards their goal. We describe two variants of the...

Stereo vision with consumer grade high resolution cameras for a micro air vehicle

We construct a stereo vision system mounted on a micro air vehicle applying two high resolution consumer grade cameras. The system hardware and mechanical configuration are presented. A novel image processing algorithm specifically suited for high resolution stereo images is described, and its properties are discussed. Empirical data from...