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ABSTRACT
Flying insects are now seen as true aircraft, tiny and agile, and fitted with a parsimonious brain capable of visually navigating in unpredictable environments. Understanding how they fly would help engineers resolve various issues in drone miniaturization. To robotize a drone weighing 1 kg, conventional avionics can be employed by miniaturizing avionic systems, but at the expense of flight autonomy. However, robotizing a drone with a mass between 1 g and 500 g requires an innovative approach. Inspiration can be taken from flying insects with regard to both their flapping-wing propulsion system and their visiosensory system, mainly based on vision, that they use to orientate in space, navigate, and avoid obstacles.
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Read the articleAUTHORS
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Julien SERRES: Senior Lecturer, Aix-Marseille University, Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, ISM, Marseille, France
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Stéphane VIOLLET: Research Director CNRS Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, ISM, Marseille, France
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Franck RUFFIER: CNRS Research Fellow Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, ISM, Marseille, France
INTRODUCTION
So-called "bio-inspired" robot control techniques are still in their infancy. But there's no lack of models to follow. All the difficult problems of autonomous aerial robotics, such as attitude control, automatic take-off, automatic landing, automatic docking, dynamic camouflage, or tracking and capturing intruders, were solved by Nature several hundred million years ago. The many ethological experiments carried out over the last 80 years, particularly on winged insects, have revealed original ideas that have been widely tested and optimized in terms of choice of sensory modalities, multisensory fusion methods and computational complexity adapted to on-board resources.
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KEYWORDS
miniaturization | aircraft | drones | flying insects
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