From Wheels to Wings with Evolutionary Spiking Neurons

• Published in: Artificial Life, vol. 11, num. 1-2, p. 121-138
• Publication date: 2005

We give an overview of the EPFL indoor flying project, whose goal is to evolve neural controllers for autonomous, adaptive, indoor micro-flyers. Indoor flight is still a challenge because it requires miniaturization, energy efficiency, and control of non-linear flight dynamics. This ongoing project consists in developing a flying, vision-based micro-robot, a bio-inspired controller composed of adaptive spiking neurons directly mapped into digital micro- controllers, and a method to evolve such a neural controller without human intervention. This document describes the motivation and methodology used to reach our goal as well as the results of a number of preliminary experiments on vision-based wheeled and flying robots.

Note: Sponsor: Swiss National Science Foundation

Keywords: Bio-inspired Flying Robots

Reference

• LIS-ARTICLE-2005-001
• doi:10.1162/1064546053278900

• URL: http://phd.zuff.info

Record created on 2006-01-12, modified on 2012-03-21