Talking Robots Podcast: Jean-Christophe Zufferey
Posted August 31, 2007 by Ash
2 Comments »
A new Talking Robots podcast is available. In this episode they interview Jean-Christophe Zufferey, a researcher at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the EPFL in Switzerland, and discuss his fly inspired 10g microflyer.
Currently the system is capable of navigating autonomously in small indoor areas using optical flow to control its flight.
Check it out here.
Very cool. It is interesting how they have split the vision into two line sensors to assist in controlling the flight. When they said “textured enviroment” I did not exactly expect the highly artificial setup that they showed. Amazing work for only 10g. I guess that fully autonomous is good in case of a comms breakdown, but for surveilance apps they would need to stream the video data back to a base unit anyway and allow some sort of remote instruction…
It’s a bit like those toys on the string that fly around and around… Only there’s no string and it goes up and down. All by itself.
Roland
Hehe yeah it is amazing for the size of the thing
Some time ago I stumbled across a project that used hacked optical mouse chips as a flight control systems for a micro-flyer.
The chips have all of the optical flow logic built in and (at least the ones I have seen) return delta x/y values as the mouse moves. By taking off the standard all-in-one lens and adding a different the chip they can be used to calculate speed etc as the flyer moves.
I find the link again unfortunatel but i’ll add it to the knowledgebase if I do. If you do google ‘optical mouse robot’ then you at least get a lot of related stuff.