Results are described of an ongoing project whose goal is to provide advanced Computer Vision for small low flying autonomous aircraft. The work consists of two parts; range-based vision for object recognition and pose estimation, and monocular vision for navigation and collision avoidance. A wide variety of range imaging methods were considered for the former, and it was found that a promising...

Traditional micro air vehicles (MAVs) are miniature versions of full-scale aircraft from which their design principles closely follow. The first step in aircraft design is the development of a conceptual design, where basic specifications and vehicle size are established. Conceptual design methods do not rely on specific knowledge of the propulsion system, vehicle layout and subsystems; these d...

The Autonomous UAV Technologies Laboratory 1 at Linköping University, Sweden, has been developing fully autonomous rotor-based UAV systems in the miniand micro-UAV class. Our current system design is the result of an evolutionary process based on many years of developing, testing and maintaining sophisticated UAV systems. In particular, we have used the Yamaha RMAX helicopter platform (Fig. 1) ...

In p r es e nt d a y mod e r n wor l d Vehicles have become an part and parcel of every one's life. Situations and circumstances have their predominant role in the usage of vehicles in this modernized urban life. As to consider both sides of the coin, this has its own effects, one of the main side effects being air pollution. Each and Every vehicle will have emission but the main problem occurs...

The small size of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) allows a wide range of robotic applications, such as surveillance, inspection and search & rescue. In order to operate autonomously, the robot requires the ability to known its position and movement in the environment. Since no assumptions can be made about the environment, the robot has to learn from its environment. Simultaneous Localization and ...

This work describes an implantable microreservoir device that enables delivery of dose volumes using an electrochemically based transport mechanism intended to use for insect flight controls. We present the overall design, operating principle and construction of the device, and experimental results. This effort is a critical component in our development of “Insect Micro-Air-Vehicles” which aim ...

A communication system between two autonomous micro air vehicles is proposed. Laser communication offers advantages in range, power, and bandwidth when line of sight is available. Beamsteering is accomplished using gyro-stabilized MEMS micromirrors. A custom CMOS smart-pixel imager implements a 1Mbps receiver, including analog front-end and variable-gain amplifier at each pixel. Algorithms are ...

We have developed a visually based autopilot for Micro Air Vehicles (MAV), which we have called OCTAVE (Optical altitude Control sysTem for Autonomous VEhicles). First we built a miniature MAV and an indoor test-bed. The minihelicopter is tethered to a whirling arm and rotates around a central pole equipped with ground-truth positioning sensors for experimental evaluation. The 100-gram rotorcra...