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: