From Wheels to Wings with Evolutionary Spiking Neurons

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-linear flight dynamics. This ongoing project consists in developing a 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 neural controller without human intervention. This document describes the motivation and methodology used to reach our goal as well as the results of a number of preliminary experiments on vision-based wheeled and flying robots.