2013

Optic Flow Control of Mico-Aerial Vehicle Sept 2012 - Feb 2013

I completed the work for my master's project in Radhika Napal's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard University. I worked on vision-based control of a 30 gram autonomous micro-aerial vehicle (MAV). We used specialized vision sensors to estimate the optic flow around the helicopter. This information is then used to control the aircraft and ultimately for more complex tasks such as egomotion estimation, mapping, and coordination. We investigated strategies for indoor navigation with fully on-board computation. In order to test various sensor configurations and control strategies, I created a 3-dimensional simulation of the MAV and sensor ring using the Webots robotics simulator, along with a custom physics plugin.

micro-aerial vehicle with custom sensor ring

Collaborators: Dr. Karthik Dantu, Dr. Richard Moore, Dr. Radhika Nagpal (faculty), Dr. Dario Floreano (faculty)
Files: report, final presentation
Videos: simulation
Tags: optic flow, autonomous robots, MAVs, indoor navigation, Webots simulation, image interpolation algorithm, Harvard University, EPFL

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