Present-day research on autono up against a serious problem, w always been faced from the v obstacles. The ground-observa “drones” are sent require the patterns of ground relief. In th Air Vehicles (UAV) and Micr drones, the eyes and brain of th by an on-board processing syste through even the most cluttered winged insects are particular flying machines that can serve a micro-robots of the futu...

This paper presents a vision-based receding horizon control algorithm for enabling a micro air vehicle to fly autonomously through an unknown urban environment. A vision-based geometry estimation algorithm is used to generate a map of the environment and provide obstacle avoidance constraints on permissible MAV trajectories. The geometry estimation process is comprised of three components: a fe...

Autonomous path planning of Micro Air Vehicles(MAVs) in an urban environment is a challenging task because urban environments are dynamic and have variety of obstacles, and the locations of these obstacles may not be available a priori. In this paper we develop a reactive guidance strategy for collision avoidance using bearing-only measurements. The guidance strategy can be used to avoid collis...

Recently, substantial progress has been made towards designing, building and test-flying remotely piloted Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). This progress in overcoming the aerodynamic obstacles to flight at very small scales has, unfortunately, not been matched by similar progress in autonomous MAV flight. Thus, we propose a robust, vision-based horizon detection algorithm as the first step towards au...

The development of flapping-wing micro air vehicles (MAVs) demands a systematic exploration of the available design space to identify ways in which the unsteady mechanisms governing flapping-wing flight can best be utilized for producing optimal thrust or maneuverability. Mimicking the wing kinematics of biological flight requires examining the potential effects of wing morphology on flight per...

The main contribution of this paper is a tightly-coupled visual-inertial fusion algorithm for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) for a quadrotor micro aerial vehicle (MAV). Proposed algorithm is based on an extended Kalman filter that uses a platform specific dynamic model to integrate information from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a monocular camera on board the MAV. MAV dyn...

micro-leakage, one of the major reasons for recurrent decays, may lead to uncontrollable flow of liquids, pulp inflammation and peri-apical pathology. the purpose of this in vitro study was to evaluate micro-leakage of pit and fissure sealants after using three different pit and fissure preparation techniques: 1) acid etching, 2) fissure enameloplasty and acid etching, and 3) air abrasion and a...

Small unmanned air vehicles are limited in sensor weight and power such that detection and avoidance of unknown obstacles during flight is difficult. This paper presents a low power low weight method of detection using a laser range finder. In addition, a rapidly-exploring random tree algorithm to generate waypoint paths around obstacles known a priori is presented, and a dynamic geometric algo...

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-...

We have sought to accurately quantify automobile HVAC air flow rates in four passenger vehicles, under a range of different ventilation settings and speeds. We used Sulphur Hexafluoride (SF6) as a tracer gas, coupled with a portable doser/sampler system to quantify flow rates and leakage. Results of this work indicate a linear increase in HVAC air flow rate with increasing vehicle speed for all...