Publications by Antoine Beyeler

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We describe an incremental approach towards the development of autonomous indoor flyers that use only vision to navigate in textured environments. In order to cope with the severe weight and energy constraints of such systems, we use spiking neural controllers that can be implemented in tiny micro-controllers and map visual information into motor commands. The network morphology is evolved by means of an evolutionary process on the physical robots. This methodology is tested in three robots of increasing co

Because of their ability to naturally float in the air, indoor airships (often called blimps) constitute an appealing platform for research in aerial robotics. However, when confronted to long lasting experiments such as those involving learning or evoluti ...

In this paper, we present Ishtar, a lightweight and versatile collection of software for remote data access and monitoring. The monitoring architecture is crucial during the development and experimentation of autonomous systems like Micro Air Vehicles. Ishtar comprises a flexible communication layer that allows enumeration, inspection and modification of data in the remote system. The protocol is designed to be robust to the data loss and corruption that typically arises with small autonomous system, while

Lightweight micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs) capable of autonomous flight in natural and urban environments have a large potential for civil and commercial applications, including environmental monitoring, forest fire monitoring, homeland securi ...

Optic-flow is believed to be the main source of information allowing insects to control their flight. Some researchers have tried to apply this paradigm to small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). So far, none of them has been able to demonstrate a fully autonomous flight of a free-flying system without relying on other cues such as GPS and/or some sort of orientation sensor (IMU, horizon detector, etc.). Getting back to the reactive approach suggested by Gibson (direct perception) and Braitenberg (direct con

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

Take-off and landing manoeuvres are critical for MAVs because GPS-based autopilots usually do not perceive distance to the ground or other potential obstacles. In addition, attitude estimates based on inertial sensors are often perturbed by the strong acce ...

This present invention describes a novel vision-based control strategy for autonomous cruise flight in possibly cluttered environments such as – but not limited to - cities, forests, valleys, or mountains. ...

Antoine Beyeler

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Vision-based Navigation from Wheels to Wings

Flying over the Reality Gap: From Simulated to Real Indoor Airships

Ishtar: a flexible and lightweight software for remote data access

Vision-based control of near-obstacle flight

Optic Flow to Steer and Avoid Collisions in 3D

Optic flow to control small UAVs

Vision-based control of near-obstacle flight

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

A 10-gram Vision-based Flying Robot

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

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

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

3D Vision-based Navigation for Indoor Microflyers

Bioinspired Vision-based Microflyers

A 10-gram Microflyer for Vision-based Indoor Navigation

optiPilot: control of take-off and landing using optic flow

Visual autopilot for near-obstacle flight

Near-obstacle flight with small UAVs

Insect-inspired Autonomous Microflyer

How to control MAVs in cluttered environments?