In this chapter, we will address two senses of the term “mobile robot navigation:” (1) finding a position or a course; and (2) travelling from place to place. In simplistic language, these two meanings correspond to answers to the questions “Where am I?’ and “How do I get there?’ Although the robotics community has devoted significant effort to unattended air and water vehicles, in this chapter...

This paper addresses the recent development of real-time visual odometry system based on a dual optical-flow system and its integration to an inertial navigation system aiming for smallscale flying robots. To overcome the unknown depth information in optic-flow, a dual opticflow system is developed and tested. The flow measurements are fused with a low-cost inertial sensor using an extended Kal...

As the characteristic size of a flying robot decreases, the challenges for successful flight revert to basic questions of fabrication, actuation, fluid mechanics, stabilization, and power whereas such questions have in general been answered for larger aircraft. When developing a flying robot on the scale of a common housefly, all hardware must be developed from scratch as there is nothing “off-...

Flying insects are able to navigate complex and highly dynamic environments, can rapidly change their flight speeds and directions, are robust to environmental disturbances, and are capable of long migratory flights. However, flying robots at similar scales have not yet demonstrated these characteristics autonomously. Recent advances in mesoscale manufacturing, novel actuation, control, and cus...

The locomotor controller for walking, running, swimming, and flying animals is based on a Central Pattern Generator (CPG). Models of CPGs as systems of coupled non-linear oscillators have been proposed and have been used for the control of robots. In this paper we describe the implementation of an adaptive CPG model in a compact, custom analog VLSI circuit. We demonstrate the function of the ch...

To increase the mobility of on-orbit robotic systems, Space Free-Flying Robots (SFFR) in which one or more manipulators are mounted on a thruster-equipped base, have been proposed. Unlike fixedbased manipulators, the robotic arms of SFFR are dynamically coupled with each other and the freeflying-base, hence the control problem becomes more challenging. In this paper, the Multiple Impedance Cont...

The International Aerial Robotics Competition is an annual event sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems (AUVS). The competition requires flying robots to locate, manipulate, and transport objects from one location to another. These tasks are carried out under extreme conditions. A robot must operate without human guidance, ensuring system survival, while completing the goals ...

This study reports on experiments on falcons wearing miniature videocameras mounted on their backs or heads while pursuing flying prey. Videos of hunts by a gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus), gyrfalcon (F. rusticolus)/Saker falcon (F. cherrug) hybrids and peregrine falcons (F. peregrinus) were analyzed to determine apparent prey positions on their visual fields during pursuits. These video data were...

The possibilities and ease of control make a quadrotor aircraft an attractive platform for studying swarm behavior, modeling, and control. The energetics of sustained flight for small aircraft, however, limit typical applications to only a few minutes. Adding payloads – and the mechanisms used to manipulate them – reduces this flight time even further. In this paper we present the flying monkey...

Disassembly-based motion planning (DBMP) is a novel and efficient single-query, sampling-based motion planning approach for free-flying robots. Disassembly-based motion planning uses workspace information to determine the workspace volume of a potential solution path and uses this information to exclude large portions of configuration space from exploration. It also identifies the most constrai...