Jean-Christophe Zufferey

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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 ...

We give an overview of the EPFL indoor flying project, whose goal is to evolve autonomous, adaptive, indoor micro-flyers. Indoor flight is still a challenge because it requires miniaturization, energy efficiency, and smart control. This ongoing project consists in developing an autonomous flying vision-based micro-robot, a bio-inspired controller composed of adaptive spiking neurons directly mapped into digital micro-controllers, and a method to evolve such a network without human intervention. This documen

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 ...

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. However, research in this field is limited by the complexity and expensiveness of existing platforms. To boost the popularity of aerial robotics and provide easier access to it, we present the first steps of developing an autonomous flying platform that is uniq

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 ...

Summarizing, we present a 1.5g gliding robot that can do phototaxis as a first step towards a novel palm sized self deploying microglider. To reduce the weight, we developed a 0.2g SMA actuator for rudder control that is harmoniously integrated in the airframe structure. We show that gliding flight is an energy efficient and easy to use aerial locomotion method for small robots.

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 ...

Our goal is to demonstrate the ability of bio-inspired techniques to solve the problem of piloting an autonomous 40-grams aircraft within textured indoor environments. Because of severe weight and energy constraints, inspiration has been taken from the fly and only visual and vestibular-like sensors are employed. This paper describes the models and algorithms that will be used for altitude control and frontal obstacle avoidance, mainly relying on optic flow. For experimental convenience, both mechanisms hav

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

We aim at developing vision-based controllers for microyers capable of ying autonomously in indoor environments. Although signicant advances have been made in this domain over the past decade, only subproblems have been successfully addressed (for example wall avoidance) and no ying robot is yet fully capable of achieving this goal. Since ying insects show remarkable indoor ight capabilities, they serve as a major source of inspiration at the level of both sensor suite and control. Traditional approaches th

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 publication, we pre ...

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

Jean-Christophe Zufferey

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CURVACE - CURVed Artificial Compound Eyes

Evolving Spiking Neurons from Wheels to Wings

3-D Relative Positioning Sensor for Indoor Flying Robots

A Low-cost, Safe and Easy-to-Use Flying Platform for Outdoor Robotic Research and Education

A 1.5g SMA-actuated Microglider looking for the Light

A 1.5g SMA actuated Microglider looking for the Light

Euler Spring Collision Protection for Flying Robots

Optic-flow-based steering and altitude control for ultra-light indoor aircraft

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

A miniature 7g jumping robot

Indoor Navigation with a Swarm of Flying Robots

Reverse-engineering of Artificially Evolved Controllers for Swarms of Robots

Bioinspired Vision-based Microflyers

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

Energy Management for Indoor Hovering Robots

From Wheels to Wings with Evolutionary Spiking Neurons

A Minimalist Control Strategy for Small UAVs

The EPFL jumpglider: A hybrid jumping and gliding robot with rigid or folding wings

Evolutionary Swarms of Flying Robots

A 10-gram Microflyer for Vision-based Indoor Navigation