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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46 unmanned systems inside April/May 2016 AIR INNOVATION tion control and how it can be applied to UAS— particularly UAS that need to fly in tight spaces. Like an insect, drones deployed to hazardous areas for search and rescue missions or to in- spect a f lare stack at a refinery need to see all around them as they fly. The cameras traditionally found on UAS are similar to human eyes; they have one lens and see objects in high resolution, Floreano said. Insects, on the other hand, have hundreds of eyes that see the world in low resolution yet cov- er a large area. When an image moves across their eyes, they extract the information and capture mathematical relations, a fact Floreano said was only recently discovered. "All insects on this planet use vision to main- tain their altitude, to avoid collisions with ob- stacles, to find their nests and to do a lot of things," Floreano said. "That's how we started to develop a number of control algorithms that made their way to commercial drones." Miniaturizing UAS About six years ago, TechJect won a contract from the U.S. Air Force to develop a miniature drone that could be used for a variety of com- plex applications, TechJect President Jayant Ratti said. The team set to work creating a UAS that mimicked the dragonfly. The idea was to create a small UAS that was both covert and seemingly benign and that could f ly for long endurance missions, Ratti said. The Robot Dragonf ly is what they came up—it looks like a real dragonf ly and is pocket- able and disposable. "Dragonflies in general are extremely efficient fliers," Ratti said. "They have the ability to glide and the ability to hover. They can do both as a single entity. They can stop and go when they want, much like a helicopter, and can glide al- most like an airplane." Small insects usually have w ings w ith resonant mechanisms, that is the vibrations Photo courtesy of Sean Humbert and Dr. Paul Samuel of Daedalus Flight Systems "ALL INSECTS ON THIS PLANET use vision to maintain their altitude, to avoid collisions with obstacles, to fnd their nests and to do a lot of things." Professor Dario Floreano, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Inspired by hummingbirds: The hummingbird-like vehicle Professor Sean Humbert and his team are building.