Free as a Bird: Event-Based Dynamic Sense-and-Avoid for Ornithopter Robot Flight

Autonomous flight of flapping-wing robots is a major challenge for robot perception. Most the previous sense-and-avoid works have studied problem obstacle avoidance considering only static obstacles. This letter presents fully onboard dynamic scheme large-scale ornithopters using event cameras. These sensors trigger pixel information due to changes illumination in scene such as those produced by objects. The method performs xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">event-by-event processing low-cost hardware small aerial vehicles. proposed detects obstacles and evaluates possible collisions with body. controller actuates over horizontal vertical tail deflections execute maneuver. validated both indoor outdoor scenarios different shapes sizes. To best authors’ knowledge, this first event-based robot.