Related papers: Optical Flow Sensing and the Inverse Perception Pr…
To make efficient use of limited physical resources, the brain must match its coding and computational strategies to the statistical structure of input signals. An attractive testing ground for these principles is the problem of motion…
We characterize the computation of motion in the fly visual system as a mapping from the high dimensional space of signals in the retinal photodetector array to the probability of generating an action potential in a motion sensitive neuron.…
Animal collective behavior is often modeled with self-propelled particles, assuming each individual has ``omniscient'' knowledge of its neighbors. Yet, neighbors may be hidden from view and we do not know the effect of this information…
Achieving reliable and safe autonomous driving in off-road environments requires accurate and efficient terrain traversability analysis. However, this task faces several challenges, including the scarcity of large-scale datasets tailored…
Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
Ideally, robots should move in ways that maximize the knowledge gained about the state of both their internal system and the external operating environment. Trajectory design is a challenging problem that has been investigated from a…
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,…
Animals often forage via Levy walks stochastic trajectories with heavy tailed step lengths optimized for sparse resource environments. We show that human visual gaze follows similar dynamics when scanning images. While traditional models…
The mechanism by which a tiny insect or insect-sized robot could estimate its absolute velocity and distance to nearby objects remains unknown. However, this ability is critical for behaviors that require estimating wind direction during…
Insects have tiny brains but complicated visual systems for motion perception. A handful of insect visual neurons have been computationally modeled and successfully applied for robotics. How different neurons collaborate on motion…
Drawing inspiration from biology, we describe the way in which visual sensing with a monocular camera can provide a reliable signal for navigation of mobile robots. The work takes inspiration from a classic paper by Lee and Reddish (Nature,…
Low speed does not always guarantee safety in off-road driving. For instance, crossing a ditch may be risky at a low speed due to the risk of getting stuck, yet safe at a higher speed with a controlled, accelerated jump. Achieving such…
The biomechanics of the human body gives subjects a high degree of freedom in how they can execute movement. Nevertheless, subjects exhibit regularity in their movement patterns. One way to account for this regularity is to suppose that…
Tracking motions of humans or objects in the surroundings of the robot is essential to improve safe robot motions and reactions. In this work, we present an approach for scene flow estimation from low-density and noisy point clouds acquired…
In this paper we are interested to the zygodactyly phenomenon in birds, and in particolar in parrots. This arrangement, common in species living on trees, is a distribution of the foot with two toes facing forward and two back. We give a…
Agile quadrotor flight relies on rapidly planning and accurately tracking time-optimal trajectories, a technology critical to their application in the wild. However, the computational burden of computing time-optimal trajectories based on…
Model-based control is a popular paradigm for robot navigation because it can leverage a known dynamics model to efficiently plan robust robot trajectories. However, it is challenging to use model-based methods in settings where the…
This paper investigates optimal takeoff trajectory planning for a quadrotor modeled with vertical-plane rigid body dynamics in an uncertain, one-dimensional wind-field. The wind-field varies horizontally and propagates across an operating…
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…
Bio-inspired design is often used in autonomous UAV navigation due to the capacity of biological systems for flight and obstacle avoidance despite limited sensory and computational capabilities. In particular, honeybees mainly use the…