Unconventional Aerial Robotics Made in Switzerland Samir Bouabdallah, André Noth, Jean-Christophe Zufferey

// sustainable flight // In the constantly growing field of autonomous airplanes, an important issue is the energy storage that limits the endurance. Using solar cells to get energy during the day and charge a battery for the night, one could fly endlessly during several days. The big challenge is the design of such systems in order to optimize endurance, while embedding a certain payload.

At the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at ETHZ, the Sky-Sailor project started with the objective to develop general methodologies for the design of solar airplanes, from small Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) to manned airplanes. A first prototype with 3.2m wingspan and a weight of 2.6kg was successfully tested during an autonomous solar-powered flight of 5 hours. Such airplane could be used for forest fire monitoring, boarder surveillance and many other applications.

// indoor hovering platforms // Imagine a very small, human-made flying object navigating in your apartment! It could perform several tasks as surveillance, monitoring and even search and rescue when necessary. These tasks are not only important for the end user but also interesting from a scientific point of view. Indeed, the future of MAV is facing numerous challenges like complex aerodynamics, multifunctional materials and structures, robust navigation algorithms and high capacity power devices.

The Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at ETHZ is following the vision of autonomous helicopter miniaturization towards flying and self navigation in cluttered environments. Several small helicopters have been developed from scratch, while reducing the vehicle size and mass in every new design. The current project targets the design integration and autonomous control of a 30g coaxial helicopter equipped with a 360° vision-based range finding system.

// bio-inspired control // Taking inspiration from biology in the design of aerial robots is obvious when one acknowledges the tremendous performance of flying insects and birds as compared to current autonomous flying robots that are far from being as agile, small, robust and efficient. However, engineers cannot blindly apply principles found in nature to design flying systems because the substrates, materials, building blocs, and embedded processing means are fundamentally different.

At the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS), at EPFL, a series of cheap, robust and highly reactive autonomous flying robots have been developed. They have been parsimoniously inspired from flying insects at different levels such as sensory modalities, information processing, and behavior. The latest prototype, a 10-gram microflyer demonstrated full autonomous flight in an office-sized arena using a mere 100 pixels, 2 rate gyros and a miniature anemometer.

// André // André Noth was born in 1980 in Fribourg, Switzerland. He received his M.Sc. in Microengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2004. He worked during his master thesis on the Synthesis and Implementation of a Controller for a quadrotor helicopter. He started then his Phd on the solar airplane project Sky-Sailor at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at EPFL. During these years, he supervised the projects of more than 20 students and gave lectures on Dynamic Systems Modeling. He moved in 2006 to Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETHZ) where he continues his Phd. André is author of several conference and journal papers and one book chapter on aerial robotics. His research interests include solar powered robots, mechatronic systems and aerial robots design.

Contact: andre.noth@mavt.ethz.ch

Project website: http://sky-sailor.epfl.ch

// Samir // Samir Bouabdallah was born in 1977. He received his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Abu Bekr Belkaid University (ABBU) Tlemcen, Algeria in 2001. His master thesis was the development of an autonomous mobile robot for academic research. Late 2001, he started work at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at EPFL as research assistant and has been involved in several activities, for example designing the hardware for the educational robot Smartease, giving lectures, supervising student projects (about 20 project), co-organizing several times EPFL’s robots contest, and participating in the design of RoboX the tour guide robot of Expo.02, an exposition organized in Switzerland every 25 years. In 2003, the crazy idea of making Alice micro-robot flying made him discover the world of flying robots. He started then his doctoral thesis in this field at the ASL (EPFL). In 2006, he moved to Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETHZ), as post-doc at the new Autonomous Systems Lab, where he is working on a micro-helicopter project. He is the author of several conference and journal papers and one book chapter on aerial robotics. His current research interests are control systems and design optimization of VTOL Miniature Flying Robots.

Contact: samir.bouabdallah@ieee.org

OS4 project website: http://asl.epfl.ch/research/projects/VtolIndoorFlying/indoorFlying.php

MuFly project website: http://www.mufly.org

// Jean-Christophe // Jean-Christophe Zufferey is research scientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS). After completing his master project at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg (CMU) as an exchange student, he graduated in 2001 with a M.S. in micro-engineering. In 2005, he received his Ph.D. in Autonomous Robotics at EPFL. His research interests are in aerial, bio-inspired and evolutionary robotics. Since 2001, he has been working on a project aimed at developing ultra-light, vision-based, indoor flying robots. In 2004, he demonstrated the world-first robot capable of flying indoor inspired on the fly visual mechanisms for which he was awarded a best poster award. He then received the ABB 2006 award for his pioneering contribution to the science and technology of autonomous flying microrobots inspired by the biology of flying insects. Jean-Christophe co-authored several peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and took part in a number of international conferences. In 2001, is co-founded DIDEL SA, which is involved in educational robotics and ultra-light indoor slow-flyers. He is also part of the organizing committee of the 2007 international symposium on Flying Insects and Robots (http://fir.epfl.ch).

Contact: jean-christophe.zufferey@epfl.ch

Project website: http://lis.epfl.ch/microflyers