Inside Unmanned Systems provides actionable business intelligence to decision-makers and influencers operating within the global UAS community. Features include analysis of key technologies, policy/regulatory developments and new product design.
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45 unmanned systems inside April/May 2016 ENGINEERING. PRACTICE. POLICY. Photos courtesy of TechJect insect's resiliency makes it easier and less risky to use. But the researchers at Flyability aren't the only ones looking to insects for inspiration, and f lies aren't the only bugs that drone designers can learn from. Wasps, hawk moths and dragonf lies are among the other insects researchers are studying in the hope of developing unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) with similar characteristics. Perception Control There are many applications that call for smaller UAS, from delivering packages for Amazon to finding people lost in dangerous places. The problem is, traditional sensors and key algorithms generally can't be scaled down that far. Insects like fruit f lies and hawk moths can help re- searchers solve some of these challenges, Professor J. Sean Humbert said. Through his work at the University of Maryland and now the Univer- sity of Colorado Boulder, Humbert has studied insect perception and their innate ability to understand even the most complex environments and then react to them—and how those abilities can be applied to UAS. Humbert has mostly looked at the novel sensors and sensory archi- tecture insects use for navigation and has found they are very good at taking very dense streams of information and then extracting just the basics of what they need to function, which is proximity and rela- tive velocity. "We've developed sensors and feedback control algorithms to achieve cluttered-environment navigation based on that type of perception," said Humbert, who worked with the Army for eight years to develop teams of insect-inspired robots for a variety of missions. "This process is much quicker and much simpler than a digital camera. Insects need to react quickly to things like clotheslines and powerlines, so their perception needs to be very fast. That's where insects excel. They've optimized the temporal part of perception to minimize the time it takes to identify objects. Those are the abilities we're try- ing to translate into the drones we're building." Dario Floreano, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, also has studied insect percep- fast fact Insects can take very dense streams of information and extract the basics of what they need to function—proximity and relative velocity. TOP: A dragonfl y on a plant. MIDDLE: Robot Dragonfl y Variations with micro multi-sensor fl ight control and cameras (Supported by Vairdo Inc.) BOTTOM: Delta Robot Dragonfl y Visualization: with fore- aft Articulating wings.