Drone wobbles like an insect
With sensors switched on, a drone hangs perfectly still in the lab. But switch them off and let the drone orient itself visually and it starts wobbling like an insect in front of a flower. This fine study by researchers at the TU Delft MAV (micro air vehicles) lab, together with French colleagues (Aix Marseille Universite, CNRS), shows the kinship between live insects and small drones.
Unlike drones, insects have no organ that perceives accelerations, so the question was how they orient themselves. This is through a combination of visual perception of movement (optical flow) and a mental model of their own movement, the researchers write this week in Nature.
Dr Guido de Croon, professor of Bio-inspired Micro Air Vehicles at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, says: “Having a motion model means that a robot or animal can predict how it will move when it takes actions. For example, a drone can predict what will happen if it spins its two right propellers faster than the left propellers. Since a drone’s position determines the direction in which it accelerates, and this direction can be picked up by changes in optical flow, their combination allows a drone to determine its attitude.”
The finding may be used to reduce the number of sensors in miniaturizing insect-like drones.
The researchers produced this short video (2 min):
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