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Autonomous navigation is a major challenge in the development of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Especially, when an algorithm has to be efficient, insect intelligence can be a source of inspiration. One of the elementary navigation tasks of insects and robots is “homing”, which is the task of returning to an initial starting position. A promising approach uses learned visual familiarity of a route to determine reference headings during homing. In this paper, an existing biological proof-of-concept is transferred to an algorithm for micro drones, using vision-in-the-loop experiments in indoor environments. An artificial neural network determines which control actions to take place.

In this paper, we present a 3D rotating laser-based navigation framework for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) to fly autonomously in dynamic environments. It consists of a 6-degree of freedom (DoF) localization module and a 3D dynamic mapping module. A self-designed rotating laser scanner generates dense point clouds in which 3D features are extracted and aligned. The localization module is able to solve scan distortion issue while estimating the 6-DoF pose of MAVs. At the same time, the dynamic mapping module can further eliminate dynamic trails so that a clear dense 3D map is reconstructed. The dynamic targets are detected based on the spatial constraints and therefore without the need of dense point cloud clustering. Through filtering the detected dynamic obstacles, the localization approach can be robust to the dynamic environment variations. To verify the robustness and effectiveness of our proposed framework, we have tested our system in both real indoor environment with dynamic obstacles and outdoor foliage condition using a customized MAV platform.

In the field of robotics, a major challenge is achieving high levels of autonomy with small vehicles that have limited mass and power budgets. The main motivation for designing such small vehicles is that compared to their larger counterparts, they have the potential to be safer, and hence be available and work together in large numbers. One of the key components in micro robotics is efficient software design to optimally utilize the computing power available. This paper describes the computer vision and control algorithms used to achieve autonomous flight with the $\sim$30g tailless flapping wing robot, used to participate in the International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Competition (IMAV 2018) indoor microair vehicle competition. Several tasks are discussed: line following, circular gate detection and fly through. The emphasis throughout this paper is on augmenting traditional techniques with the goal to make these methods work with limited computing power while obtaining robust behavior.