Related papers: Animal-Inspired Agile Flight Using Optical Flow Se…
Autonomous agile flight brings up fundamental challenges in robotics, such as coping with unreliable state estimation, reacting optimally to dynamically changing environments, and coupling perception and action in real time under severe…
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…
Soaring birds gain energy from stable ascending currents or shear. However, it remains unclear whether energy loss due to drag can be overcome by extracting work from transient turbulent fluctuations. We designed numerical simulations of…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
The visual cue of optical flow plays a major role in the navigation of flying insects, and is increasingly studied for use by small flying robots as well. A major problem is that successful optical flow control seems to require distance…
The main contribution of this paper is a novel sensory feedback control law for an octopus arm. The control law is inspired by, and helps integrate, several observations made by biologists. The proposed control law is distinct from prior…
Flight is a complicated task at small scales in part due to the ubiquitous unsteady air which contains it. Flying organisms deal with these difficulties using active and passive control mechanisms to steer their body motion. Body attitudes…
Flying animals, such as bats, fly through their fluidic environment as they create air jets and form wake structures downstream of their flight path. Bats, in particular, dynamically morph their highly flexible and dexterous armwing to…
Monitoring aerial objects is crucial for security, wildlife conservation, and environmental studies. Traditional RGB-based approaches struggle with challenges such as scale variations, motion blur, and high-speed object movements,…
Optical flow computation with frame-based cameras provides high accuracy but the speed is limited either by the model size of the algorithm or by the frame rate of the camera. This makes it inadequate for high-speed applications. Event…
Several models of flocking have been promoted based on simulations with qualitatively naturalistic behavior. In this paper we provide the first direct application of computational modeling methods to infer flocking behavior from…
Catching objects in-flight is an outstanding challenge in robotics. In this paper, we present a closed-loop control system fusing data from two sensor modalities: an RGB-D camera and a radar. To develop and test our method, we start with an…
UAV collective motion has become a hot research topic in recent years. The realization of UAV collective motion, however, relied heavily on centralized control method and suffered from instability. Inspired by bird flocking theory, a…
Bio-inspired methods can provide efficient solutions to perform autonomous landing for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Flying insects such as honeybees perform vertical landings by keeping flow divergence constant. This leads to an exponential…
The study of the movement of flocks, whether biological or technological is motivated by the desire to understand the capability of coherent motion of a large number of agents that only receive very limited information. In a biological…
This paper discusses elements of a control theory of systems comprised of networks of simple agents that collectively achieve sensing and actuation goals despite having strictly limited capability when acting alone. The goal is to…
A head tracker is a crucial part of the head mounted display systems, as it tracks the head of the pilot in the plane/cockpit simulator. The operational flaws of head trackers are also dependent on different environmental conditions like…
The optical flow of humans is well known to be useful for the analysis of human action. Given this, we devise an optical flow algorithm specifically for human motion and show that it is superior to generic flow methods. Designing a method…
The robust detection of small targets against cluttered background is important for future artificial visual systems in searching and tracking applications. The insects' visual systems have demonstrated excellent ability to avoid predators,…
Bird-sized flapping-wing robots offer significant potential for agile flight in complex environments, but achieving agile and robust trajectory tracking remains a challenge due to the complex aerodynamics and highly nonlinear dynamics…