The 6-pixel low-speed Visual Motion Sensor (VMS) inspired by insects' visual systems presented here performs local 1-D angular speed measurements ranging from 1.5 • /s to 25 • /s and weighs only 2.8g. The entire optic flow processing system, including the spatial and temporal filtering stages, has been updated with respect to the original design.This new lightweight sensor was tested under free-flying outdoor conditions over various fields onboard a 80kg unmanned helicopter called ReSSAC. The visual disturbances encountered included helicopter vibrations, uncontrolled illuminance, trees, roads, and houses. The optic flow measurements obtained were finely analyzed online and also offline, using the sensors of various kinds mounted onboard ReSSAC. The results show that the optic flow measured despite the complex disturbances encountered closely matched the approximate ground-truth optic flow.

This paper presents experimental results of fullyautonomous coordinated flight of multiple UAVs. The coordination control law is designed based on the decentralized virtual leader approach, and its stability is theoretically proven. A mission scenario is defined by a sequence of four different coordination phases, to every of which the same controller is applied with different configuration settings. The proposed law has been implemented and demonstrated onboard the ONERA fixed-wing UAV platforms.

For the last few decades, growing interest has returned to the quite challenging task of the autonomous lunar landing. Soft landing of payloads on the lunar surface requires the development of new means of ensuring safe descent with strong final conditions and aerospace-related constraints in terms of mass, cost and computational resources. In this paper, a two-phase approach is presented: first a biomimetic method inspired from the neuronal and sensory system of flying insects is presented as a solution to perform safe lunar landing. In order to design an autopilot relying only on optic flow (OF) and inertial measurements, an estimation method based on a two-sensor setup is introduced: these sensors allow us to accurately estimate the orientation of the velocity vector which is mandatory to control the lander's pitch in a quasi-optimal way with respect to the fuel consumption. Secondly a new low-speed Visual Motion Sensor (VMS) inspired by insects' visual systems performing local angular 1-D speed measurements ranging from 1.5 • /s to 25 • /s and weighing only 2.8 g is presented. It was tested under free-flying outdoor conditions over various fields onboard an 80 kg unmanned helicopter. These preliminary results show that the optic flow measured despite the complex disturbances encountered closely matched the ground-truth optic flow.