Insect Inspired Visual Motion Sensing and Flying Robots

Abstract

Flying insects excellently master visual motion sensing techniques. They use dedicated motion processing circuits at a low energy and computational costs. Thanks to observations obtained on insect visual guidance, we developed visual motion sensors and bioinspired autopilots dedicated to flying robots. Optic flow-based visuomotor control systems (VMS) have been implemented on an increasingly large number of sighted autonomous robots. In this chapter, we present how we designed and constructed local motion sensors (LMS) and how we implemented bioinspired visual guidance scheme on-board several micro-aerial vehicles. An hyperacute sensor in which retinal micro-scanning movements are performed via a small piezo-bender actuator was mounted onto a miniature aerial robot. The tethered OSCAR II robot is able to track a moving target accurately by exploiting the micro-scanning movement imposed to its eye's retina. We also present two interdependent control schemes driving the eye-in-robot angular position and the robot's body angular position with respect to a visual target but without any knowledge of the robot's orientation in the global frame. This "steering-by-gazing" control strategy, which is implemented on this lightweight (100 g) miniature sighted aerial robot, demonstrates the effectiveness of this biomimetic visual/inertial heading control strategy. 565 Handbook of Biomimetics and Bioinspiration Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH on 03/16/15. For personal use only. 566 T. Raharijaona et al.

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“…While the biological substrate has not yet been fully identified [12], the biorobotic approach is particularly useful both in the fields of neuroscience and robotics [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], because the robotic model can be tested under similar experimental conditions such as ethological experiments and it can suggest new biological hypotheses ( Figure 1). From these interactions between ethological experiments, computational models, and robotics ( Figure 1), uncertainties can be removed by considering the minimum requirements to perform any navigational tasks (e.g., [21][22][23][24][25]).…”

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