If you swat at it, you may get a whole swarm after you, not to mention someone from the Navy asking, “Citizen, why did you crush that million dollar prototype?”
Robots.net points to a post by Roland Piquepaille about a flying robot guided by indoor vision.
“It’s not always easy to explore small buildings in dangerous areas and even more difficult to see what might be hidden in a cave or a tunnel. In a short article, the MIT Technology Review describes the results obtained by Swiss researchers with a small robotic aircraft. It only weighs 30 grams for a 80-centimeter wingspan and can be flown inside a building for about 4 minutes. With its two 1-gram cameras, a gyroscope, and a small microcontroller onboard, it can detect walls and automatically avoid collisions. The team is now working on even smaller versions of these flying robots which will be used for search-and-rescue, reconnaissance, and inspection applications.”
A recently published paper, Toward 30-gram Autonomous Indoor Aircraft: Vision-based Obstacle Avoidance and Altitude Control (PDF format) presents the research conducted at the EPFL Autonomous Systems Lab on the design and control of miniature VTOL flying robots.
Robots.net opines:
The robot uses Optical Flow to understand the motion it sees. This is an under-utilized biologically inspired vision processing method that’s always been a favorite of mine for robotics applications.
Optical Flow guidance is, of course, a nice feature to have with Peeping Blimp, which would have much greater “hang time” than minature robot helicopters. You were lucky that the prototypes lack the minature Stinger missles, eh?
