Scaling down the size and mass of micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) increases their agility and their ability to operate in tight formations. In addition, smaller robots are safer and, as we will show in this paper, more robust to collisions. This paper addresses the development of a pico quadrotor measuring 11 cm from tip to tip, with a mass of 25g. To increase the robustness of the robot to collisions, the vehicle is equipped with a 2 gram carbon fiber cage that protects it from impact velocities in excess of 4 m /s and also permits recovery after collisions. We present the design of the electrical, mechanical and computational elements, as well as experimental results demonstrating trajectory following with feedback from an external motion camera system, recovery from collisions with walls and other robots, and formation flight.
onsumer-grade technology seen in cameras and phones has led to the price-performance ratio falling dramatically over the last decade. We are seeing a similar trend in robots that leverage this technology. A recent development is the interest of companies such as Google, Apple, and Qualcomm in high-end communication devices equipped with such sensors as cameras and inertial measurement units (IMUs) and with significant computational capability. Google, for instance, is developing a customized phone equipped with conventional as well as depth cameras. This article explores the potential for the rapid integration of inexpensive consumer-grade electronics with the offthe-shelf robotics technology for automation in homes and offices. We describe how standard hardware platforms (robots, processors, and smartphones) can be integrated through simple software architecture to build autonomous quadrotors that can navigate and map unknown, indoor environments. We show how the quadrotor can be stabilized and controlled to achieve autonomous flight and the generation of three-dimensional (3-D) maps for exploring and mapping indoor buildings with application to smart homes, search and rescue, and architecture. This opens up the possibility for any consumer to take a commercially available robot platform and a smartphone and automate the process of creating a 3-D map of his/her home or office. The price-performance ratio of processors, sensors, and networking infrastructure, which has dropped significantly over the last decade, has led to new applications founded on the convergence of computation, sensing, and computing. A recent General Electric report [1] calls this convergence the industrial Internet and suggests that the potential macroeconomic benefit from the industrial Internet could be comparable with the economic productivity gain attributable to the Internet revolution of the late 20th century. Others call it the Internet of Things and predict an economic impact in the tens of trillions of dollars [2]. More than 75% of business leaders surveyed predicted a direct impact of this technology on their business [3]. This convergence also holds great promise for automation with robots, which "emphasizes efficiency, productivity, quality, and reliability, focusing on systems that operate autonomously, often in structured environments over extended periods" [4].In this article, we address this confluence of technologies enabling automation in the context of aerial robotics, a field that has also seen dramatic advances over the last decade. The same drop in price-performance ratio of processors and sensors has fueled the development of micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are between 0.1 and 1 m in length and 0.1-2 kg in mass. These low-cost platforms are easy to manufacture in contrast to the expensive UAVs used for military applications. The number of Predators and Global Hawks is estimated to be around 1,000. Growth in the consumer electronics industry (millions or billions of components at low cost) has resulted in in...
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