The small size of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) allows a wide range of robotic applications, such as surveillance, inspection and search & rescue. In order to operate autonomously, the robot requires the ability to known its position and movement in the environment. Since no assumptions can be made about the environment, the robot has to learn from its environment. Simultaneous Localization and ...

Nonlinear aeroelasticity of a flapping wing Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) is analyzed in this paper. The geometrically nonlinear deformations are modeled by a nonlinear strain-based beam formulation, coupled with six rigid-body degrees of freedom of the aircraft. Wing flapping kinematics is described using a set of Euler angles. Two types of unsteady aerodynamic formulations are incorporated for load...

I nsects and hummingbirds remain unmatched in their aerodynamic ability to hover in place in addition to other acrobatic feats such as flying backward and sideways by exploiting flapping-wing motion [1]. Although this remarkable ability is key to making small-scale aircraft, flapping-hovering behavior has been difficult to reproduce artificially because of the challenging stability, power, and ...

Flapping wing micro air vehicles have many possible applications and have therefore been the subject of extensive research. The Atalanta project aims to develop a fully autonomous, 10 cm wingspan, flapping wing sensor platform. The structure is based on a fully compliant resonating structure with passive wing pitching. Several design improvements have taken place since the last report. Introduc...

This thesis deals with distributed cohesive control of swarms of dimensionless particles and applicability of this approach for using with swarms of micro aerial vehicles. I have implemented a set of algorithms presented in [11] that leads to the cohesive swarm behavior of ground robots in a plane and extended these algorithms to 3D space for control of unmanned aerial vehicles. The behavior of...

The paper presents work on testing of inflatable wings for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Inflatable wing history and recent research is discussed. Design and construction of inflatable wings is then covered, along with ground and flight testing. Discussions include predictions and correlations of the forces required to warp (twist) the wings to a particular shape and the aerodynamic forces g...

This paper further explores the use of a genetic algorithm for the purposes of evolving the control systems for distributed micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). The control systems are essentially evolved rule sets which take into account target surveillance area coverage and built in sensors in the MAV. As in previous work where the overall task is distributed, the same rule set is contained in each ...

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We present a visual servoing approach for controlling a micro aerial vehicle which is based on monocular camera input and a fuzzy logic controller. Visual pose estimates are obtained using a state-of-theart visual SLAM approach combined with marker-based metrical initialization. In comparison to related work, we demonstrate that our system tolerates quickly changing velocity measurements which ...