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 ...

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) will provide a low-cost, redundant means to perform reconnaissance missions in urban or traditional battlefield environments. These miniaturized vehicles, however, will have extremely limited capacity for onboard navigation sensors, processors, and inter-vehicle communication. This paper explores the application of emerging consensus algorithms to the problem of distri...

Small robotic systems such as Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) need to react quickly to their dynamic environments, while having only a limited amount of energy and processing onboard. In this article, subsampling of local image samples is investigated as a straightforward and broadly applicable approach to improve the computational efficiency of vision algorithms. In sub-sampling only a small subset ...

Onboard processing of video is currently outside the capabilities of power limited micro air vehicles (MAVs), which forces researchers to transmit video and telemetry to a ground control station for capture and offline processing. Unfortunately, wireless video transmission can introduce structured noise, which can corrupt image processing algorithms if the noisy frames are not identified and re...

The increased performance of small scale computing platforms enables the use of a growing number of computer vision algorithms previously limited to desktop computers. This makes visual sensor networks feasible in the close future and could lead to a convergence between distributed sensing and computer vision research fields. This paper provides an introduction to efficient computer vision appr...

Due to their small size and flight regime, coupling of aerodynamics, structural dynamics, and flight dynamics is critical for Micro Aerial Vehicles. This paper presents a computational framework for simulating structural models of varied fidelity and a Navier-Stokes solver, aimed at simulating flapping and flexible wings. The structural model utilizes either (i) the in-house developed UM/NLABS,...

2006). Flapping wing MAVs (FWMAVs) are a class of new conceptual MAVs that take design cues from flying insects in order to achieve a small size (<3–5 cm), high maneuverability and super remote ability (Yan et al. 2015). A FWMAV is expected to work in a variety of confined spaces such as urban canyons, caves, indoors, and jungles that large flying robots can’t be serviceable. To achieve such ta...

The focus of this talk will be cooperative control techniques for small and micro air vehicles. There are numerous potential applications of this technology including aerial reconnaissance, border patrol, monitoring forest fires, oil fields, and pipelines, and tracking wildlife. This talk will present a general approach to cooperative control problems which can be summarized in four steps. The ...

The purpose of the work reported here is to design a purely vision-based Simultaneous Localization And Map-building system for a MAV flying at a constant altitude. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with videos taken from a heading-down camera mounted on different MAV. In particular, results on loop-closure detection and on map-precision improvement through an on-line estimate of ...