News

MAVLab & BioMorphic Lab, winners at IMAV2024 competitions!

Brief: First place at the outdoor competition, first place at the indoor competition, and the best paper award!🥇🥇🥇 The MAVLab ...
/ biomorphic, Competitions, IMAV, mavlab, News

EU funding for TUD research on Unmanned Valley

medegefinancierd is door de eu The TUDelft MAVlab is pleased to announce together with the municipalities of Katwijk and Wassenaar, ...
/ News

Ant insights lead to robot navigation breakthrough

Inspired by how ants visually recognize their environment and count their steps to navigate back home, MAVLab researchers have developed ...
/ News, Research

End-to-end Neural Network Based Optimal Quadcopter Control

In collaboration with ESA’s Advanced Concepts Team, we published our work on end-to-end guidance and control networks in the June ...
/ News, Research

Fully neuromorphic vision and control for autonomous drone flight

Our work on fully neuromorphic vision and control for autonomous drone flight has been published in the Science Robotics May ...
/ News, Research

Direct learning of home vector direction for insect-inspired robot navigation (ICRA’24)

Abstract Insects have long been recognized for their ability to navigate and return home using visual cues from their nest's ...

ALBERO: Agile Dynamic Perching of Quadrotors on Real Tree Branches

The work from PhD candidate Liming Zheng and Assistant Professor Salua Hamaza from the BioMorphic Intelligence Lab was published in the journal ...
/ News, Research

End-to-end neural network based optimal quadcopter control

With an escalating demand for quadcopters in emergency response, inspection and delivery, the need for speed and energy efficiency is ...
/ News, Research

Never Landing Drone: Bird-inspired Autonomous Orographic Soaring

Birds display remarkable adaptability in harnessing their surroundings for efficient flight, exemplified by the ingenious behavior observed in Kestrels. These ...
/ News, Research

MAVLab @ IMAV 2023

In September, the MAVLab was at the International Micro Air Vehicle (IMAV) Conference and Competition in Aachen! The IMAV is ...
/ News

Taming Contrast Maximization for Learning Sequential, Low-latency, Event-based Optical Flow

Federico Paredes-Vallés, Kirk W. Y. Scheper, Christophe De Wagter, Guido C. H. E. de Croon Event cameras have recently gained ...
/ Research

AvoidBench @ ICRA 2023

At ICRA (IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation) 2023, MAVLab presented AvoidBench, a high-fidelity vision-based obstacle avoidance benchmarking suite ...
/ News, Research

Nature article reveals how flying insects and drones can discern up from down

Researchers from MAVLab and collaborators have developed a new theory on how flying drones and insects can estimate the gravity ...
/ News, Research

MAVLab @ IROS 2022

Salua and her team at the MAVLab and the Biomorphic Intelligence Lab have published 6 articles this month, 5 of which ...
/ News

IMAV 2022 A Big Success

From September 12th to 16th, we hosted IMAV 2022 in the Netherlands for the second time. The whole event featured ...
/ News

Insect-inspired AI for autonomous robots

Insect-inspired AI for autonomous robots Small autonomous mobile robots, such as drones, rovers, and legged robots, promise to perform a ...
/ News, Research

Self-flying drones that monitor greenhouse diseases and pests

We have teamed up with Royal Brinkman and start-up Mapture to develop AI and drone technology for greenhouse monitoring. These ...
/ News

Self-Supervised Learning of Event-Based Optical Flow with Spiking Neural Networks

Jesse J. Hagenaars*, Federico Paredes-Vallés*, Guido C.H.E. de Croon The field of neuromorphic computing promises extremely low-power and low-latency sensing ...
Autonomous swarm of tiny drones finds gas leaks

Swarm of autonomous tiny drones can localize gas leaks

A gas leak in a large building or at an industrial site is difficult to find. Human firefighters cannot see ...
/ News, Research

Learning process as a Solution to Fundamental Optical-flow Problems

Optical flow for small flying robots Flying insects heavily rely on optical flow for visual navigation and flight control. Roboticists ...

TU Delft maritime hydrogen drone flies longer and greener

A drone that can fly sustainably for long distances over land and water, and can land almost anywhere, will be ...
/ News, Robots

Neuromorphic control for optic-flow-based landings of MAVs using the Loihi processor

Neuromorphic processors like Loihi offer a promising alternative to conventional computing modules for endowing constrained systems like micro air vehicles ...
/ News, Robots

Back to Event Basics: Self-Supervised Learning of Image Reconstruction for Event Cameras via Photometric Constancy

F. Paredes-Valles, G. C. H. E. de Croon Event cameras are novel vision sensors that sample, in an asynchronous fashion, ...
/ DeepNet, FlowNet, Research

PercEvite Symposium on 26 June 2020

On 26th of June, we will host a symposium on sense and avoid technologies for small drones. The Percevite Symposium ...
/ News

MAVLab wins the AlphaPilot AI challenge

We are very proud to officially announce that we have won the AlphaPilot AI Drone Racing Innovation challenge! The challenge, ...
/ News, Robots

Swarm of tiny drones explores unknown environments

We have succeeded in making a swarm of tiny drones that can autonomously explore unknown environments. This achievement, published in ...
/ News, Robots

VTOL winged drone for Maritime Operations

Design and Testing of a Vertical take-off and Landing UAV optimized for carrying a Hydrogen Fuel-cell with Pressure Tank The ...
/ Projects

U-space: Drone airspace integration

Fully autonomous drones safely made way for the high priority drones above TU Delft campus. About VUTURA VUTURA (Validation of ...
/ News, Projects

Off to IMAV 2019

As is tradition, we will attend IMAV this year, which will be taking place in Madrid. IMAV offers a unique ...
/ News

Pelican drone ensures super quick water sampling

Good water quality is important to humans and to nature. In a country with as much water as the Netherlands ...
/ News, Robots

How Google’s sorting algorithm helps us develop swarms of drones

Our recent paper use Google's PageRank algorithm to evaluate and optimize the behavior of swarms in a computationally efficient way, ...
/ News

VUTURA

NOS.nl (national news agency in the Netherlands) - Een luchtruim vol drones – hoe organiseer je dat? https://nos.nl/artikel/2291645-een-luchtruim-vol-drones-hoe-organiseer-je-dat.html Video-item: https://nos.nl/video/2291677-hoe-ontwijkt-de-ene-drone-de-andere-als-het-vol-wordt-in-het-luchtruim.html ...
/ News

The world’s smallest autonomous racing drone

The drone racing team of the MAVLab has presented the currently smallest autonomous racing drone in the world. The drone ...
/ News

MAVLab selected for the next phase of AlphaPilot

Lockheed Martin and the Drone Racing League (DRL) have announced the nine teams that were accepted into the 2019 AlphaPilot ...
/ News

How deep neural networks see distances in a single image

TU Delft scientists have uncovered how deep neural networks see distances in a single image. They report on their findings ...
/ News

Featured in “de Volkskrant”: “Learning about about animals? Build a robotic version of them”

Dr. ir. Guido de Croon was featured on an article in the major Dutch newspaper, "de Volkskrant", wherein he discussed ...
/ News

DroneClash 2019: high-tension, high tech and good humoured.

Saturday March 16th 2019: heavy rain and strong winds. No matter for the 500 odd people who gathered in Katwijk’s ...
/ Competitions, Events, News

Drones prepare to do battle with nets, balls and a Tesla Coil at DroneClash 2019 (bright sparks included!)

Monday 11th March 2019, Delft, the Netherlands. How do you take down a drone? This is the question being asked ...
/ Competitions, Events, News

Robust indoor flight by a team of small drones

Teams of autonomous drones could be used in rescue missions, exploration, and more. How can we enable them to fly ...
/ News, Research

A novel algorithm for emergent patterns by swarms of simple robots

Small robots have limited perception and processing power. This is an inconvenient truth that we have to deal with. With ...
/ News, Research

Delfy Nimble on NPO

The Delfly Nimble was featured on the program "Kleine beestjes: de superhelden van de aarde" ("Small beasts: the superheroes of ...
/ News

DroneClash 2019: the bravest and best in counter-drone tech

Public awareness of drones has risen dramatically over recent months. In the wake of the Gatwick drone incidents, the word ...

First place and innovation award at IMAV 2018

A team of TU Delft and ENAC researchers has won the overall 1st prize at the outdoor competition of the ...
DelFly Nimble

MAVLAB off to IMAV 2018

Next week, the MAVLab will be off to the 10th International Micro Air Vehicle Competition and Conference, which will take ...

Pelican Drone

Besides dikes, the Netherlands are well known for its many lakes and rivers. It is difficult and labor intensive to ...

DelFly Nimble

The DelFly Nimble, a new bio-inspired robot developed by MAVLab and employed for insect-flight research, is featured on the cover ...
Tom van Dijk

New PhD student: Tom van Dijk

We are happy to introduce a new Ph.D. student - Tom van Dijk - within the project "PercEvite: Sense and ...

Paper: Towards a swarm with pocket drones – IROS 2017

In a previous post, we showed that a tiny 40-gram pocket drone can fly autonomously inside a room. Now we ...
/ Research

3rd place (and more) at the IMAV2017

With a 3rd place prize, a best paper prize and a best system prize at the 2017 installation of the ...
Cyclone

Control of the Cyclone Hybrid UAV

Cyclone In cooperation with the dronelab of ENAC in Toulouse, we have developed a hybrid UAV, called 'Cyclone'. It is ...
/ cyclone, hybrid, INDI, Research, Robots

Towards an autonomous pocket drone for indoor navigation

In recent experiments, we were able to show a 40-gram pocket drone flying inside an indoor environment, autonomously, using nothing ...
/ Research
Diana Olejnik

New PhD student: Diana Olejnik

We are happy to introduce a new Ph.D. student. Diana Olejnik within the project: “Bio-inspired control and design of flapping ...
/ delfly, mavlab, News

DroneClash announces first two counter-drone measures

DroneClash, the first ever counter-drone competition, is announcing two of the counter-drone measures that teams must tackle during the game ...

First Anti-Drone Race

DroneClash To incorporate drones in our lives in a good and safe way, we need anti-drone instruments. On 13 February ...
/ anti-drone, Competitions, drone, Events, FPV

Introduction to Paparazzi Autopilot

Parapazzi Introductory Course Please find the introduction to vision based control with the paparazzi autopilot on a Bebop in an ...
/ Code, Education

Flapping Wing Modelling

Model identification of small flapping wing vehicles with unsteady aerodynamics requires new approaches. Publications [bibtex author="Armanini|Caetano" file="https://github.com/tudelft/publications/raw/master/pure.bib" group=year sort=year order=entrytype ...

Swarm Exploration with Pocketdrones

The aim of this project is to investigate and design an autonomous swarm of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs)to do multi-robot ...
/ Research

IMAV 2016

In the week of October 17-21, the Micro Air Vehicle lab participated in the IMAV 2016 conference and competitions, which ...

TU Delft becomes second in first autonomous drone race

The MAV-lab team of students and researchers has become second in the first ever autonomous drone race, which took place ...
IRIDIUM CORE IR9523 CARRIER BOARD

Open Source Iridium Communication IRIDIUM CORE IR9523 Carrier Board

Iridium The MavLab released v1.0 of their Iridium Satellite Communication System. Overall it acts as a transparent link with serial ...
Autonomous SPHERES drone learns how "to see" in zero gravity

Drone learns “to see” in zero-gravity

During an experiment performed on board of the International Space Station (ISS) a small drone successfully learned by itself to ...

DELFTACOPTER – Outback Medical Express

DELFTACOPTER is a hybrid electric UAV with exceptional efficiency both in hovering and fast forward flight. It is equipped with state ...
Author: Kirk Scheper

Guest Lecture: Prof. Guszti Eiben and The First Robotic Baby

Professor Guszti Eiben from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will be coming to our faculty at 10:00 on the 18th of ...
See distances with one eye

New theory allows drones to see distances with one eye

A new theory has been published that allows drones to see distances with a single camera. TU Delft’s Micro Air ...
Delfly

Extremely light-weight Autonomous MAVs

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are becoming ever smaller and lighter. This opens new areas of application, mainly because of the ...

BERISUAS Project Successfully Finished

The MAVLab finished the Interreg project BERISUAS, BEtter Response and Improved Safety through Unmanned Aircraft Systems: http://www.berisuas.eu/ ...
/ berisuas, drone, interreg, mavlab, MIRG, Projects, safety

BERISUAS International Test – UAS in Maritime Incident Response

On Saturday, June 18th the first international test with deploying an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to aid in combating an ...
Festo BionicANT

Festo BionicANT

The Festo BionicANT program is using the stereo-vision system developed at the MavLab. https://www.festo.com/group/de/cms/10157.htm All details of the BionicANT can ...

Cyber Zoo Opened

The opening of the TU Delft Cyber Zoo was Wednesday 5th of March. The Cyber Zoo is a new research and ...

Optical Flow based Slope Estimation

Our open-source "Optical Flow based Slope Estimation" code can be found: first_release_OF_slope_estimation publication: [bibtex file="https://github.com/tudelft/publications/raw/master/pure.bib" key=a0abc18b3ee04b4eaac9c3907a07dd49 highlight="optic|flow|slope|estimation"] ...
/ Code, matlab, open source, optic flow

Innovation Awards

DelFly Explorer is selected to participate at the Innovation Awards: https://innovation-awards.nl/concept/delfly-explorer/ ...
/ delFly explorer, Events, mavlab

BERISUAS Symposium

BERISUAS stands for "Better response and improved safety through UAS" Read the BERISUAS Publication Project Video: TU Delft is the ...
/ berisuas, Events, interreg, mavlab, Projects, symposium
Interreg 3I

3I

Integrated Coastal Zone Management via Increased Situation Awareness through Innovations on Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Project website: http://www.2seas-uav.com/ ...
/ interreg, mavlab, Projects, safety, spotter

Outback UAV Challenge 2014 (team OpenUAS)

http://www.uavoutbackchallenge.com.au/ www.uavchallenge.csiro.au/galleries/2014/open_uas/open_uas.php ...
/ competition, Events, mavlab

IMAV 2014

The International Micro Air Vehicle conference and competition 2014 (IMAV 2014) took place in Delft, the Netherlands. See: http://www.imavs.org  ...
/ competition, conference, Events, IMAV, mavlab

MilFly

/ delfly, Projects

FireSwarm

In this project, research is performed on a swarm of MAVs that will be able to search in a large ...
/ mavlab, Projects, swarm
Evolutionary Robotics

Evolutionary Robotics for Micro Air Vehicles

Small robots with limited computational and sensory capabilities are becoming more commonplace. Designing effective behavior for small robotic platforms to ...
DelFly Explorer

DelFly Explorer

TU Delft researchers have developed the DelFly Explorer, the world's first Micro Air Vehicle with flapping wings that can avoid obstacles ...
MavLab wins IMAV 2013

IMAV 2013

The MavLab team of the TUDelft presented their latest developments at IMAV2013 in Toulouse. The IMAV is a conference and ...
/ Competitions, Events, IMAV, mavlab
paparazzi lisa-s

LISA-S: “the world’s smallest open source autopilot”

he Micro Aerial Vehicle Laboratory at the TU Delft faculty of Aerospace Engineering has designed, built and tested the world’s ...

Hybrid MAV wins 1st prize at DSE Symposium

The objective of this project was to design a system of multiple MAVs capable of flying in a swarm to ...
Quadshot

Swarm of Hybrid UAVs for the Acquisition of Distributed Measurements

A Swarm of Hybrid UAV can perform measurements in a large area. To cover this area, the drones need quite ...
/ hybrid, mavlab, Projects, quadshot, Research, swarm
Project Explorer

Project Explorer

The TU Delft participated in Project Explorer to enhance the operational possibilities of unmanned aerial vehicles for use by Police, ...
/ Projects, regulations
Vision Based Landing

Intelligent Vision-based Landing System of UAVs

Background The capability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform landing task is essential for the autonomous operation, especially when ...

Github

The MAVLab participates in several open source projects. The projects can be found on github: http://www.github.com/tudelft/ ...
/ Code, github, opensource, paparazzi

Hear and Avoid

Being allowed to operate an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in operational airspace requires certification of the aircraft while guaranteeing the ...

DelFly

In the DelFly project, we design and study autonomous flapping wing MAVs. Our approach is to always work with flying ...
DelFly Micro

DelFly Micro is the smallest camera equipped aircraft in the world

DelFly Micro is the "Smallest camera equipped Airplane" is the world (*Guiness Book of Records 2008). Read the full TUDelft article ...
/ delfly micro, Research, Robots

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, ...