Related papers: Animal-Inspired Agile Flight Using Optical Flow Se…

Quadrotors are agile. Unlike most other machines, they can traverse extremely complex environments at high speeds. To date, only expert human pilots have been able to fully exploit their capabilities. Autonomous operation with on-board…

Existing optical flow methods are erroneous in challenging scenes, such as fog, rain, and night because the basic optical flow assumptions such as brightness and gradient constancy are broken. To address this problem, we present an…

Automated animal behavior analysis relies on long-term, interpretable individual trajectories; however, multi-animal tracking in space science experimental videos remains highly challenging due to weak appearance cues, low-quality imaging,…

Many applications require robots to move through complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles, such as self-driving, search and rescue, and extraterrestrial exploration. Although robots are already excellent at avoiding sparse obstacles, they…

Many organisms, from flies to humans, use visual signals to estimate their motion through the world. To explore the motion estimation problem, we have constructed a camera/gyroscope system that allows us to sample, at high temporal…

Drones, like most airborne aerial vehicles, face inherent disadvantages in achieving agile flight due to their limited thrust capabilities. These physical constraints cannot be fully addressed through advancements in control algorithms…

The development of automatic perception systems and techniques for bio-inspired flapping-wing robots is severely hampered by the high technical complexity of these platforms and the installation of onboard sensors and electronics. Besides,…

In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as…

This paper concerns applications of a recently-developed output-tracking technique to trajectory control of autonomous vehicles. The technique is based on three principles: Newton-Raphson flow for solving algebraic equations,output…

The performance of optical flow algorithms greatly depends on the specifics of the content and the application for which it is used. Existing and well established optical flow datasets are limited to rather particular contents from which…

Efficient motion planning algorithms are of central importance for deploying robots in the real world. Unfortunately, these algorithms often drastically reduce the dimensionality of the problem for the sake of feasibility, thereby foregoing…

When robots are able to see and respond to their surroundings, a whole new world of possibilities opens up. To bring these possibilities to life, the robotics industry is increasingly adopting camera-based vision systems, especially when a…

Evolutionary Robotics allows robots with limited sensors and processing to tackle complex tasks by means of sensory-motor coordination. In this paper we show the first application of the Behaviour Tree framework to a real robotic platform…

Animals within groups need to coordinate their reactions to perceived environmental features and to each other in order to safely move from one point to another. This paper extends our previously published work on the flight patterns of…

The ability to use inexpensive, noninvasive sensors to accurately classify flying insects would have significant implications for entomological research, and allow for the development of many useful applications in vector control for both…

We investigate the hovering dynamics of rigid bodies with up-down asymmetry placed in oscillating background flows. Recent experiments on inanimate pyramid-shaped objects in oscillating flows with zero mean component demonstrate that the…

Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of…

Visual intelligence requires anticipating the future behavior of agents, yet vision systems lack a general representation for motion and behavior. We propose dense point trajectories as visual tokens for behavior, a structured mid-level…

We tackle the problem of estimating optical flow from a monocular camera in the context of autonomous driving. We build on the observation that the scene is typically composed of a static background, as well as a relatively small number of…

Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…