Evolving Spiking Neurons from Wheels to Wings

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 document describes the motivation and methodology used to reach our goal as well as the results of a number of experiments on vision-based wheeled and flying robots.