Bio-inspired Flying Robots
Experimental Synthesis of Autonomous Indoor Flyers

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, EPFL Press, 2008

 

 
Book abstract

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This book demonstrates how bio-inspiration can lead to fully autonomous flying robots without relying on external aids. Most existing aerial robots fly in open skies, far from obstacles, and rely on external beacons – mainly GPS – to localise and navigate. However, these robots are not able to fly at low altitude or in confined environments, and yet this poses absolutely no difficulty to insects. Indeed, flying insects display efficient flight control capabilities in complex environments despite their limited weight and relatively tiny brain size.

From sensor suite to control strategies, the literature on flying insects is reviewed from an engineering perspective in order to extract useful principles that are then applied to the synthesis of artificial indoor flyers. Artificial evolution is also utilised to search for alternative control systems and behaviours that match the constraints of small flying robots. Specifically, the basic sensory modalities of insects, vision, gyroscopes and airflow sense, are applied to develop navigation controllers for indoor flying robots. These robots are capable of mapping sensor information onto actuator commands in real time to maintain altitude, stabilize the course and avoid obstacles. The most prominent result of this novel approach is a 10-gram microflyer capable of fully autonomous operation in an office-sized room using fly-inspired vision, inertial and airspeed sensors.

This book is intended for all those interested in the autonomous robotics, working both in academic and industrial settings.

 
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Related Work (Chap. 2)

Fig. 2.1
3-gram Picoflyer by Petter Muren
2005
Fig. 2.2
The Seiko-Epson micro helicopter
2004
Fig. 2.3
The Naval Postgraduate School 14-gram biplane flapping thruster
2003
Fig. 2.4
The 15-gram flapping-wing DelFly
2005
Fig. 2.5
The Berkeley micromechanical flying insect
2001
Fig. 2.8
Melissa at Univ. of Zurich, a blimp capable of visual odometry indoors
2001
Fig. 2.9
The CNRS tethered helicopter demonstrating optic-flow-based altitude control
2003
Fig. 2.13
Drexel optic-flow-based indoor flyers
2003

Flying Insects (Chap. 3)

Sect. 3.4
Blowfly body and head tracking using small sensor coils
1998

Robotic Platforms (Chap. 4)

Fig. 4.5
Early prototypes of indoor slow flyers, including the C4
2001
Fig. 4.6
The F2 prototype, a 30-gram indoor flyer
2004
Fig. 4.7
The 5-gram MicroCeline from DIDEL (non-robotic version of Fig. 4.7): remote-controlled in a small room
2005
Fig. 4.7
The 5-gram MicroCeline from DIDEL (non-robotic version of Fig. 4.7): flying down a corridor, entering rooms, landing on a table
2005

Optic-flow-based Control Strategies (Chap. 6)

Fig. 6.11
F2 autonomous steering (collision avoidance) without altitude, nor speed control
2004
Fig. 6.18
MC2 fully autonomous flight
2007
Extra
optiPilot: autonomous outdoor flight of a swinglet avoiding collisions with ground, trees, buildings and water
2008
Extra
optiPilot: autonomous take-off and landing of a swinglet using seven computer mouse optic-flow sensors
2009

Evolved Control Strategies (Chap. 7)

Fig. 7.7b
Evolved Khepera/kevopic displaying vision-based collision avoidance
2002
Fig. 7.7d
Evolved Khepera/kevopic displaying saccadic vision-based collision avoidance with backward movements
2004
Sect. 7.3.1
Evolved Blimp2b in simulation
2004
Fig. 7.9b
Real Blimp2b evolved for vision-based autonomous steering
2004
Fig. 7.9d
Evolved Blimp2b starting in a difficult situation and diplaying backward motion before recovery
2004
Sect. 7.3.2
Evolved Blimp2b encountering an unpredictable obstacle
2004
Extra
Blimp2b evolved in simulation for a larger room and displaying efficient collision avoidance and wall following capabilities when tested in reality
2005

 


© Jean-Christophe Zufferey - Last update: 24.08.2009/jcz