To design efficient flapping wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), a comprehensive sizing method based on theoretical and statistical analyses is proposed and experimentally verified. This method is composed of five steps including defining and analyzing the MAV mission, determining the flying modes, defining the wing shape and aspect ratio of the wing, applying the constraint analysis based on the...

Small flying robots can perform landing maneuvers using bio-inspired optical flow by maintaining a constant divergence. However, optical flow is typically estimated from frame sequences recorded by standard miniature cameras. This requires processing full images on-board, limiting the update rate of divergence measurements, and thus the speed of the control loop and the robot. Event-based camer...

We are currently developing new numerical simulation methods and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes designed for advanced fluid-structure interaction (FSI) applications that have moving mechanical components and/or changing domain shapes. The method is called Dynamic-Mesh (DM) and is currently being implemented in parallel within our XFlow CFD simulation code. This method involves the tig...

This paper expands on previous work to introduce a high quality, but low cost attitude and heading reference system (AHRS), that is physically small, lightweight, and lowpower. Previous Work on the sensor has shown that for non-accelerating environments, this small low-cost sensor has a short term accuracy of approximately 4 ◦ in pitch, roll, and yaw. We extend the previous two-step non-linear ...

Flying insects and birds are able to navigate swiftly in unknown environments with very few computational resources. They are not guided via radio links with any ground stations and perform all the required calculations on-board. The ability to stabilize the gaze is the key to an efficient visual guidance system, as it reduces the computational burden associated with visuo-motor processing. Smo...

This paper describes the development and verification of a competitive parachute system for Micro Air Vehicles, in particular focusing on verification of the embedded software. We first introduce the overall solution including a system level failure analysis, and then show how we minimized the influence of faulty software. This paper demonstrates that with careful abstraction and little overapp...

In this paper, we develop a unified vision system for small-scale aircraft, known broadly as Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs), that not only addresses basic flight stability and control, but also enables more intelligent missions, such as ground object recognition and moving-object tracking. The proposed system defines a framework for real-time image feature extraction, horizon detection and sky/groun...

In this paper, we present a vision system for object recognition in aerial images, which enables broader mission profiles for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). The most important factors that inform our design choices are: real-time constraints, robustness to video noise, and complexity of object appearances. As such, we first propose the HSI color space and the Complex Wavelet Transform (CWT) as a se...

Recently, we have successfully implemented and tested a vision based horizon-tracking algorithm for flight stability and autonomy in Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Occasionally, this algorithm fails in scenarios where the underlying Gaussian assumption for the sky and ground appearances is not appropriate. To improve its performance, especially in the presence of video noise, we consider a novel im...