The European Project sFly: Swarm of Micro Flying Robots EU FP7,
Micro-UAVs for Rescue and Inspection Autonomous micro helicopters are about to play major roles in tasks like: search and rescue environment monitoring inspection Access to environments where no human or other vehicles gets access to, Reducing the risk for the environment and people Inspector x y z Personnel operates in high risk environmentReplace by tele-operated aerial inspection vehicle
Consortium Switzerland ETH Autonomous Systems Lab (leader) ETH Computer Vision Lab CSEM: Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique France INRIA: French National Research Institute Greece Techical University of Crete Germany Ascending Technology
sFly: objectives Coordinated flight in small swarms in constrained and dense environments (e.g. urban) Inter-distance estimation Low power communication (between helicopters and with the ground station using GSM) Inherently safe (< 1 Kg) Capable of autonomous navigation in GPS denied environments Vision-based fully autonomous navigation and mapping
The System The Platform Hummingbird quadrotor helicopter from Ascending Technologies ( ) 50 cm diameter 200 g additional payload on-board IMU (roll, pitch, yaw) The camera 190º field-of-view fisheye camera On-board Processing Intel Atom, 1.6 GHz
Evolution of the platform 1 st version: Hummingbird 2 nd version: Pelican 3rd version: Hexacopter
The Problem: Vision-based motion estimation… R, T = ? … and 3D reconstruction … without GPS. How?
How does it work? Image 1 Image 2 R, T = ?
Outdoor Results Stable hovering at 15 m height Large scale reconstruction form aerial images during autonomous flight
sFly: what’s the next step? Coordinated flight with multiple helicopters using single cameras only For more info: Contact: