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Jean-Christophe Zufferey

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Related publications (61)

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A Simple and Robust Fixed-Wing Platform for Outdoor Flying Robot Experiments

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Severin Leven

Aerial Robotics are interesting and useful tools because they have some intrinsic advantages over ground and water based systems, like the possibility to observe things from above or to locomote without being perturbed by obstacles and rough terrain. Howev ...

2007

Method to determine a direction and amplitude of a current velocity estimate of a moving device

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adrien Briod

A new method for the estimation of ego-motion (the direction and amplitude of the velocity) of a mobile device comprising optic-flow and inertial sensors (hereinafter the apparatus). The velocity is expressed in the apparatus's reference frame, which is mo ...

2014

The AirBurr: A Flying Robot That Can Exploit Collisions

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz

Research made over the past decade shows the use of increasingly complex methods and heavy platforms to achieve autonomous flight in cluttered environments. However, efficient behaviors can be found in nature where limited sensing is used, such as in insec ...

2012

3D Vision-based Navigation for Indoor Microflyers

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Antoine Beyeler

Fully autonomous control of ultra-light indoor airplanes has not yet been achieved because the strong limitations on the kind of sensors that can be embedded make it difficult to obtain good estimations of altitude. We propose to revisit altitude control b ...

2007

Aerial Locomotion in Cluttered Environments

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Mirko Kovac, Adam Klaptocz, Jürg Markus Germann

Many environments where robots are expected to operate are cluttered with objects, walls, debris, and different horizontal and vertical structures. In this chapter, we present four design features that allow small robots to rapidly and safely move in 3 dim ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2016

Towards the Self Deploying Microglider; Gliding Flight and Bioinspired Wing Folding Mechanism

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Mirko Kovac, Grégory Savioz

The Self Deploying Microglider project aims at developing a novel palm sized robot that can climb up walls, deploy itself into the air, recover from every position in air and perform subsequent goal directed gliding and attachment to walls. So far, we deve ...

2007

Evaluation of control strategies for fixed-wing drones following slow-moving ground agents

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Grégoire Hilaire Marie Heitz, Maja Varga

There are many situations where fixed-wing drones may be required to track ground moving agents, such as humans or cars, which are typically slower than drones. Some control strategies have been proposed and validated in simulations using the average dista ...

Elsevier2015

CURVACE - CURVed Artificial Compound Eyes

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Michal Karol Dobrzynski, Ramon Pericet Camara, Géraud L'Eplattenier

CURVACE aims at designing, developing, and assessing CURVed Artificial Compound Eyes, a radically novel family of vision systems. This innovative approach will provide more efficient visual abilities for embedded applications that require motion analysis i ...

Elsevier B.V.2011

3-D Relative Positioning Sensor for Indoor Flying Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Timothy Stirling, James Roberts

Swarms of indoor flying robots are promising for many applications, including searching tasks in collapsing buildings, or mobile surveillance and monitoring tasks in complex man-made structures. For tasks that employ several flying robots, spatial-coordina ...

Springer Verlag2012

The locomotion capabilities of the EPFL jumpglider: A hybrid jumping and gliding robot

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Mirko Kovac

Recent work suggests that wings can be used to prolong the jumps of miniature jumping robots. However, no functional miniature jumping robot has been presented so far that can successfully apply this hybrid locomotion principle. In this video publication, ...

2011

A 1.5g SMA-actuated Microglider looking for the Light

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Mirko Kovac, Jean-Daniel Nicoud, André Guignard

Unpowered flight can be used in microrobotics to overcome ground obstacles and to increase the traveling distance per energy unit. In order to explore the potential of goal-directed gliding in the domain of miniature robotics, we developed a 22cm microglid ...

Ieee Service Center2007

Euler Spring Collision Protection for Flying Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz, Ludovic Daler

This paper addresses the problem of adequately protecting flying robots from damage resulting from collisions that may occur when exploring constrained and cluttered environments. A method for designing protective structures to meet the specific constraint ...

2013

Beat-Based Synchronization and Steering for Groups of Fixed-Wing Flying Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Sabine Hauert, Severin Leven

Groups of fixed-wing robots can benefit from moving in synchrony to share sensing and communication capabilities, avoid collisions or produce visually pleasing choreographies. Synchronous motion is especially challenging when using fixed-wing robots that r ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2013

A miniature 7g jumping robot

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Mirko Kovac, André Guignard

Jumping can be a very efficient mode of locomotion for small robots to overcome large obstacles and travel in natural, rough terrain. In this paper we present the development and characterization of a novel 5cm, 7g jumping robot. It can jump obstacles as h ...

2008

Indoor Navigation with a Swarm of Flying Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Timothy Stirling, James Roberts

Swarms of flying robots are promising in many applications due to rapid terrain coverage. However, there are numerous challenges in realising autonomous operation in unknown indoor environments. A new autonomous flight methodology is presented using relati ...

IEEE2012

Reverse-engineering of Artificially Evolved Controllers for Swarms of Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Sabine Hauert

It is generally challenging to design decentralized controllers for swarms of robots because there is often no obvious relation between the individual robot behaviors and the final behavior of the swarm. As a solution, we use artificial evolution to automa ...

2009

Toward 30-gram Autonomous Indoor Aircraft: Vision-based Obstacle Avoidance and Altitude Control

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey

We aim at developing autonomous micro-flyers capable of navigating within houses or small built environments. The severe weight and energy constraints of indoor flying platforms led us to take inspiration from flying insects for the selection of sensors, s ...

2005

Energy Management for Indoor Hovering Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, James Roberts

Flying has an advantage when compared to ground based locomotion, as it simplifies the task of overcoming obstacles and allows for rapid coverage of an area while also providing a birds-eye-view of the environment. One of the key challenges that has preven ...

2008

From Wheels to Wings with Evolutionary Spiking Neurons

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Jean-Daniel Nicoud

We give an overview of the EPFL indoor flying project, whose goal is to evolve neural controllers for autonomous, adaptive, indoor micro-flyers. Indoor flight is still a challenge because it requires miniaturization, energy efficiency, and control of non-l ...

2005

A Minimalist Control Strategy for Small UAVs

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Severin Leven

Most autopilots of existing Miniature Unmanned Air Vehicles (MUAVs) rely on control architectures that typically use a large number of sensors (gyros, accelerometers, magnetometers, GPS) and a computationally demanding estimation of flight states. As a con ...

IEEE2009