Jean-Christophe Zufferey

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Autonomous flight in confined or cluttered environments such as houses or urban canyons requires high manoeuvrability, fast mapping from sensors to actuators and very limited overall system weight. Although flying animals are well capable of coping with such situations, roboticists still have difficulties at reproducing such capabilities. This paper describes how we took inspiration from flying insects to progress toward the goal of developing small UAVs able to dynamically fly in cluttered environments. Th

This paper presents a novel control strategy, which we call optiPilot, for autonomous flight in the vicinity of obstacles. Most existing autopilots rely on a complete 6-degree-of-freedom state estimation using a GPS and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) a ...

This paper describes the implementation and characterisation of a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) of ultra-light intelligent flying robots. The flying nature of the network makes it suitable to collect or disseminate content in urban areas or challenging ter ...

The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and other objects is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a series of optic-flow detect ...

We aim at developing ultralight autonomous microflyers capable of freely flying within houses or small built environments while avoiding collisions. Our latest prototype is a fixed-wing aircraft weighing a mere 10 g, flying around 1.5 m/s and carrying the ...

Mobile robots have the potential to become the ideal tool to teach a broad range of engineering disciplines. Indeed, mobile robots are getting increasingly complex and accessible. They embed elements from diverse ﬁelds such as mechanics, digital electronic ...

Flying robots that can locomote efficiently in GPS-denied cluttered environments have many applications, such as in search and rescue scenarios. However, dealing with the high amount of obstacles inherent to such environments is a major challenge for flyin ...

This paper presents an affordable, fully automated and accurate mapping solutions based on ultra-light UAV imagery. Several datasets are analysed and their accuracy is estimated. We show that the accuracy highly depends on the ground resolution (flying hei ...

Strategies for hybrid locomotion such as jumping and gliding are used in nature by many different animals for traveling over rough terrain. This combination of locomotion modes also allows small robots to overcome relatively large obstacles at a minimal energetic cost compared to wheeled or flying robots. In this chapter we describe the development of a novel palm sized robot of 10,g that is able to autonomously deploy itself from ground or walls, open its wings, recover in midair and subsequently perform

We propose a novel optic-flow-based flight control strategy, inspired by recent observations and hypothesis by Baird (unpublished), to regulate independently forward speed and altitude. Unlike previous approaches where longitudinal ventral optic flow was used to regulate both forward speed and altitude, we suggest to use transversal ventral optic flow generated by a stereotyped lateral oscillation to regulate altitude. Longitudinal ventral optic flow is still used to regulate forward speed. The main advanta

Autonomous control of ultra-light indoor microflyers is a difficult and largely unsolved task because of the strong limitations on the kind of sensors that can be embedded. We propose a new approach for altitude control of a 10-gram microflyer, where altit ...

Autonomous navigation in obstacle-dense indoor environments is very challenging for flying robots due to the high risk of collisions, which may lead to mechanical damage of the platform and eventual failure of the mission. While conventional approaches in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Developing a research autonomous plane for flying in a laboratory space is a challenge that forces one to understand the specific aerodynamic, power and construction constraints. In order to obtain a very slow flight while maintaining a high maneuverability, ultra-light structures and adequate components are required. In this paper we analyze the wing, propeller and motor characteristics and propose a methodology to optimize the motor/gear/propeller system. The C4 model plane (50g, 1.5m/s) demonstrates the

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 ...

Jean-Christophe Zufferey

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Optic flow to control small UAVs

Vision-based control of near-obstacle flight

Implementation of a Wireless Mesh Network of Ultra Light MAVs with Dynamic Routing

Evolved swarming without positioning information: an application in aerial communication relay

Autonomous flight at low altitude with vision-based collision avoidance and GPS-based path following

A 10-gram Vision-based Flying Robot

The e-puck, a Robot Designed for Education in Engineering

A Collision Resilient Flying Robot

The Accuracy of Automatic Photogrammetric Techniques on Ultra-light UAV Imagery

Towards a self-deploying and gliding robot

Optic-flow-based Altitude and Forward Speed Regulation using Stereotypical Lateral Movements

Vision-based Altitude and Pitch Estimation for Ultra-light Indoor Microflyers

Contact-based navigation for an autonomous flying robot

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

The AirBurr: A Flying Robot That Can Exploit Collisions

3D Vision-based Navigation for Indoor Microflyers

Aerial Locomotion in Cluttered Environments

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

Toward Indoor Flying Robots

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