IEEE Spectrum September 11, 2018
Insects are quite good at not running into things, and just as good at running into things and surviving, but targeted, accurate precision flight is much more difficult for them. Reliable and not taking much to execute is one way to summarize the focus of the next generation of practical robotics. Researchers at the University of Maryland has developed a system that allows a drone to fly through very small and completely unknown gaps using a single camera and onboard processing. The drone has no information about the location or size of the gap in advance. To detect where the gap is, the drone uses an optical-flow technique. The maximum speed that the drone was able to achieve while passing through the gap was 2.5 meters per second. It achieved a success rate of 85 percent over 150 trials for different arbitrary shaped windows under a wide range of conditions which includes a window with a minimum tolerance of just 5 cm…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
The modified drone used in UMD’s experiments includes a Nvidia TX2 module mounted at the top. For sensing, the drone uses its front-facing camera and a downward-facing optical-flow sensor, which combines a camera plus sonar.