An airborne wireless sensor network (WSN) composed of bird-sized micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) enables low cost high granularity atmospheric sensing of toxic plume behavior and storm dynamics, and provides a unique threedimensional vantage for monitoring wildlife and ecological systems. This paper describes a complete implementation of our SensorFlock airborne WSN, spanning the development of ou...

This paper addresses issues of co-evolution of form and function for autonomous vehicles, specifically evolving morphology and control for an autonomous micro air vehicle (MAV). The evolution of an optimal minimum sensor suite and reactive strategies for navigation and collision avoidance for the simulated MAV is described. The details of the implementation of the simulated aircraft, the enviro...

In this paper, a distributed coordination scheme with local interactions is studied for multiple vehicle systems. We introduce a second-order consensus protocol and derive necessary and/or sufficient conditions under which consensus can be reached in the context of uni-directional interaction topologies. The consensus protocol is then applied to achieve altitude alignment among a team of micro ...

Recent years have seen an increased interest in Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to mimicking insect behavior. MAVs have several challenging design requirements that impact processor design. These include real time processing demands and severe power/weight budgets. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of MAV applications and propose hardware ...

This study presents the design, implementation, and assessment of a combined passive active flow control technique with aim increasing aerodynamic performance fixed-wing Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Power consumption restrictions in MAVs support choice solutions such as use modified (tubercled) wing leading edge. strategy successfully allows to delay mitigate stall but detrimental effects are fou...