Autonomous flight of Micro to Nano Air Vehicles

The challenges in the autonomous flight of MAVs derive from the stringent weight and power requirements of MAVs. For example, the DelFly II flapping wing MAV weighs around 16 gram, including battery, sensors, and processing. In the same time, MAVs move rather quickly and have to respond in real time to their environment in order to navigate and explore unknown environments. Fully autonomous flight of MAV below 20 grams Control of hybrid MAV (= blend of fixed-wing + rotorcraft) Trained or adaptive control strategies

Publications

All our publications are on the publications page; the main papers on this topic:

C de Wagter, S Tijmons, BDW Remes, GCHE de Croon: Autonomous Flight of a 20-gram Flapping Wing MAV with a 4-gram Onboard Stereo Vision System. In: s.n., (Ed.): Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2014), pp. 4982–4987, IEEE, United States, 2014, (The 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2014) ; Conference date: 31-05-2014 Through 07-06-2014).

Sjoerd Tijmons, Christophe de Wagter, Bart Remes, Guido de Croon: Autonomous Door and Corridor Traversal with a 20-Gram Flapping Wing MAV by Onboard Stereo Vision. In: Aerospace — Open Access Aeronautics and Astronautics Journal, vol. 5, no. 3, 2018, ISSN: 2226-4310.

Kimberly McGuire, Christophe de Wagter, K. Tuyls, H. J. Kappen: Minimal navigation solution for a swarm of tiny flying robots to explore an unknown environment. In: Science Robotics, vol. 4, no. 35, 2019, ISSN: 2470-9476.

Shuo Li, Erik van der Horst, Philipp Duernay, Christophe De Wagter, Guido C.H.E. de Croon: Visual model-predictive localization for computationally efficient autonomous racing of a 72-g drone. In: Journal of Field Robotics, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 667–692, 2020, ISSN: 1556-4959.