Biologically Inspired Vision Systems for Flying Robots – Editorial

Investigating Classic and Biologically Inspired Vision Systems for Mobile Robots

Vision can serve many purposes when employed on a mobile robot. In order to explore the capabilities of a visually guided mobile robot, an existing robot kit used in the Intelligent Autonomous Robotics course at the University of Edinburgh was enhanced through the addition of a webcam. An API was then created for controlling the webcam within the development platform used by the robot kit. The ...

Bio-inspired Vision-based Flying Robots

There are not yet autonomous flying robots capable of manoeuvring in small cluttered environments as insects do. Encouraged by this observation, this thesis presents the development of ultra-light flying robots and control systems going one step toward fully autonomous indoor aerial navigation. The substantial weight and energy constraints imposed by this indoor flying robots preclude the use o...

A flying robot controlled by a biologically inspired vision system

We are developing small indoor autonomous helicopters controlled by biologically inspired vision systems, which can detect the displacement of their attitude with real-time video processing. A helicopter has two CCD video cameras to see landscape objects and has processing circuitry built with an FPGA. A simple vision processing method was implemented and tested. Each image is divided into 800 ...

Biologically Inspired Robots

Insect-Inspired Visual Navigation for Flying Robots

This paper discusses the implementation of insect-inspired visual navigation strategies in flying robots, in particular focusing on the impact of changing height. We start by assessing the information available at different heights for visual homing in natural environments, comparing results from an open environment against one where trees and bushes are closer to the camera. We then test a rou...