Autonomous Quadrocopters

Autonomous Robots. Cool Hardware. Interesting science. World domination. Sounds good, huh?

About three month ago, Verena told me about a project she started at the university with some students, and pretty much said the aforementioned buzzwords. Well, maybe without the world domination. And maybe way more scientific. But still, thats what I heard. I think. So it was quite obvious that I need to join that project, at least to provide some bits and a bit of help – and it turned out quite interesting. Actually, it raised even quite some media attention, from Deutschlandfunk to a video at Spiegel Online and random other media, especially when the team took part at the first Motodrone Competition. Which, by the way, took place at the former CCC-Camp-Ground, so it felt kind of weird to me.

While the hardware is rather standard – based on two microcopter kits from Mikrokopter.de, modified with a Cmucam and a mechanism which automatically levels the cam always targeting towards the ground, the software and ideas are rather interesting: The basic idea is to get an autonomous microcopter navigating only by adapted behaviours from insects and other animals – no geeky cheating technology like gps allowed.

The already implemented algorithms are an automated start-and-stay-at-some-predefined-height mechanism, which mostly is based on an air pressure sensor (which causes quite interesting effects when the copter flies too close to a wall or the ceiling – imagine a copter stuck to the ceiling and unwilling to decend back to us) and some autofollow-alike algorithm that basically follows a red dot on the floor. The latter one is being realized by some optical flow algorithm, “stolen” from bees.

Lots of other ideas and approaches are for example to be found at the website of the seminary Verena Hafner held last semester at the university (Website german only, as most linked here, sorry. But the topics of the talks should give the right google-pointers – if not, let me know). Already being prototyped, for example, is a navigation by polarized sunlight, this one is in nature used by some african ants.

While my current work for the team is nothing worth to be mentioned, just a few lines of code and playing the pr monkey because most nerds tend to be rather camera shy, and they somehow decided that I have to be the press victim, I am looking forward for the upcoming lectures at the HU Berlin from Verena this winter – lots of interesting things to learn and code. If you are a student of said university, I strongly recommend joining one of the two upcoming courses. The team is really awesome.

PS: The direct link to the Spiegel Online .flv Video is here.