Design of an On-Board Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance System for Flapping-Wing Robots
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Abstract:
The flapping-wing robot (FWR) is a kind of high-biomimetic aerial vehicle that can perform military reconnaissance and civil monitoring missions. When performing these missions, obstacle avoidance is a necessary function to ensure safety of FWRs. In this paper, an autonomous monocular-vision-based obstacle avoidance system is designed for FWRs, where all the image processing computations are implemented by using an on-board computer. In this system, the weight of the on-board computer is reduced to 48 g so that the FWR could fly properly. The workflow of the system can be divided into the following steps. First, the image acquisition module captures videos of the surrounding environment. Second, the on-board computer calculates the rudder angle and turning direction by processing the optical flow information from the first-person view. Finally, the flight control board receives the calculated results and controls the FWR to avoid obstacles. A ground station performs real-time monitoring of the FWR flight process, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the obstacle avoidance system designed in this paper.
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Nos.62225304, 61933001, 62173031, U20A20225), the Interdisciplinary Research Project for Young Teachers of Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No.FRF-IDRY-22-029), and the Beijing Top Discipline for Artificial Intelligent Science and Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing.
FU Qiang, ZHANG Zuoqing, LIU Shengnan, WU Xiaoyang, HE Wei. Design of an On-Board Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance System for Flapping-Wing Robots[J]. Transactions of Nanjing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics,2024,(1):97-106