RoboFly Project

The RoboFly project aims toward building a fully autonomous aerial vehicle capable of avoiding obstacles through the same optic flow techniques that a fly employs to navigate through its world. The principles of the flies’ optic flow processing lend themselves well for technical systems due to their robustness and parallel way of computation: Even though in comparison to higher organisms flies have exceedingly small numbers of neurons they are exceptionally skilled at avoiding obstacles even at very high speeds. This is all due to their highly optimized visual system. Building such a system generates a lot of technical know-how and insight into what problems arise and need to be solved for Robofly to fly in a controlled manner. The hope is that we can also learn from this exercise to better understand the intricate neural circuitry we find in the fly visual processing machine.

The project is comprised of three general areas. The first is a control theory oriented analysis of the core of fly motion vision, namely the Elementary Motion Detector (EMD) circuit for its use as the control system of an autonomous airborne robot. Next is the software simulation of the complete system using these EMDs as the basic processing unit for analyzing the environment of the robot. The ultimate goal of the project is to implement this control system in hardware and mount it alongside wide angle high speed cameras onto a quadrocopter platform, which is capable of hovering as well as rapid flight maneuvers.

This project is done in collaboration with Martin Buss and Kolja Kuehnlenz from the Technische Universität München (TUM) and sponsered by the BMBF within the excellence cluster Cotesys.