From wheels to wings with evolutionary spiking circuits.
We give an overview of the EPFL indoor flying project, whose goal is to evolve neural controllers for autonomous, adaptive, indoor micro-flyers. Indoor flight is still a challenge because it requires miniaturization, energy efficiency, and control of nonlinear flight dynamics. This ongoing project consists of developing a flying, vision-based micro-robot, a bio-inspired controller composed of adaptive spiking neurons directly mapped into digital microcontrollers, and a method to evolve such a neural controller without human intervention. This article describes the motivation and methodology used to reach our goal as well as the results of a number of preliminary experiments on vision-based wheeled and flying robots.
Floreano
Dario
D
Autonomous Systems Lab, Institute of Systems Engineering, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. dario.floreano@epfl.ch
Zufferey
Jean-Christophe
JC
Nicoud
Jean-Daniel
JD
D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D006801:Humans; D008904:Miniaturization / Q000379:methods* / Q000592:standards; D012371:Robotics / Q000379:methods* / Q000639:trends*; D014921:Wings, Animal / Q000502:physiology