ROSS-LAN: RObotic Sensing Simulation Scheme for Bioinspired Robotic Bird LANding

Abstract

Aerial robotics is evolving towards the design of bioinspired platforms able to mimic the behavior of birds and insects during flight. The design offlapping-wing platforms involves research from different scientific areas such as aerodynamics, mechanics, electronics and computer science. The development of perception algorithms for autonomous navigation of ornithopters requires sensor data information to study, understand and solve the limitations present during the flight of these type of robots. However, the payload constraints and hardware complexity of these type of aerial platforms hamper sensor data acquisition. This paper focuses on the development of a multi-sensor simulator able to retrieve the sensor information captured during the landing of birds. The landing trajectory is computed by using a bioinspired trajectory generator relying on tau theory. Another contribution of this paper is the online 1 publication of a dataset with the sensor measurements obtained from several trajectories simulated in different scenarios.

Why fly blind? Event-based visual guidance for ornithopter robot flight

“…The intrinsic nature of ornithopter flight requires the development of perception systems for both gliding and flapping-wing flight, ideally using the same sensors to keep the payload as low as possible. One of the first approaches to robotic visual perception for ornithopters was ROSS-LAN, a simulation scheme to obtain synthetic data of a number of sensors during landing and perching maneuvers [11]. The work in [12] developed a vision stabilizing system to address the pitch and roll fluctuations during each flapping period.…”

The GRIFFIN Perception Dataset: Bridging the Gap Between Flapping-Wing Flight and Robotic Perception

“…Recently, some datasets useful for flapping-wing robot development have been published. In a previous work we presented ROSS-LAN [15], a simulation scheme to obtain synthetic sensor data from trajectories that mimic bird flying maneuvers, and released some synthetic datasets. Also, the work in [17] includes experimental control data of an ornithopter performing landing manoeuvres in a scenario equipped with a motion capture system, but does not provide onboard sensing data that could be used in perception.…”

Asynchronous Event-based Line Tracking for Time-to-Contact Maneuvers in UAS

“…A number of works have approached Tau-dot strategy for unmanned aerial [9] [11] and ground vehicles [12]. Tau-dot strategy has also been used for simulating bird-like landing and perching maneuvers in order to provide sensor measurements [13]. The work in [11] extended Tau-dot guidance strategy to close a gap with nonzero final velocity with a rotary-wing MAV.…”