Substantial progress has been made recently towards designing, building and test-flying remotely piloted Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) and small UAVs. We seek to complement this progress in overcoming the aerodynamic obstacles to flight at very small scales with a vision-guided flight stability and autonomy system, based on a robust horizon detection algorithm. In this paper, we first motivate the ...

A tumor cell is formed when a critical amount of endogenous and/or exogenous tumorigenic stimuli is exceeded. We have shown that the transient presence of nontumorigenic stray cells in tissues of experimental animals that contain cells with a subcritical set of genetic mutations can act as a tumor-promoting stimulus. To induce somatic mutations in all chicken tissues, we have used the MAV-2 ret...

3 Public Health Laboratory Service, Regional Tuberculosis Centre, Dulwich Hospital, London SE22 8QF, UK Sequencing 280 bp of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) between the 165 and 235 rRNA genes in a collection of 46 clinical isolates of the Mycobacterium awium-intracellulare complex (MA1 complex) identified nine different sequences, grouping these isolates in nine ' ITS sequevars '. This an...

A flapping-type micro air vehicle(MAV) is one of the vehicles attracting the MAV engineers for its diverse capabilities such as agility, perching and even hover that are advantageous when performing missions in varying environments. While the flapping MAV has a history of research and development, it has considerably been relying on developers' trial and errors, and empirical skills. Particular...

The practical application of the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), for predicting the flow pattern around Multipurpose Amphibious Vehicle (MAV) hull has made much progress over the last decade. Today, several of the CFD tools play an important role in the land and water going vehicle hull form design. CFD has been used for analysis of MAV hull resistance, seakeeping, maneuvering and investiga...

Bio-inspired methods can provide efficient solutions to perform autonomous landing for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Flying insects such as honeybees perform vertical landings by keeping flow divergence constant. This leads to an exponential decay of both height and vertical velocity, and allows for smooth and safe landings. However, the presence of noise and delay in obtaining flow divergence est...

Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), such as multirotors, are envisioned for autonomous inventory-taking in large warehouses. Fully autonomous operation of MAVs in such complex 3D environments requires real-time state estimation, obstacle detection, mapping, and navigation planning. To this end, we employ a cognitive MAV equipped with multiple sensors including a dual 3D laser scanner, three stereo ca...

This paper presents a new method to estimate the range and bearing of landmarks and solve the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem. The proposed ranging and SLAM algorithms have application to a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) flying through riverine environments which occasionally involve heavy foliage and forest canopy. Monocular vision navigation has merits in MAV applications sin...

This paper presents a novel solution for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) to autonomously search for and land on an arbitrary landing site using realtime monocular vision. The autonomous MAV is provided with only one single reference image of the landing site with an unknown size before initiating this task. We extend a well-known monocular visual SLAM algorithm that enables autonomous navigation o...

Future Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) and Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) will fly in urban areas and very close to obstacles. We built a miniature (35 cm, 0.840 kg) electrically-powered aircraft which uses a motion-sensing visual system to follow terrain and avoid obstacles. Signals from the 20-photoreceptor onboard eye are processed by 19 custom Elementary Motion Detection (EMD) circuits which are deri...