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INRC Forum: Guido de Croon
11 April, 2023 @ 08:00 - 09:00 PDT
Neuromorphic sensing and processing for small, autonomous drones
Abstract: Small drones are promising for many applications, such as search-and-rescue, greenhouse monitoring, or keeping track of stock in warehouses. Since they are small, they can fly in narrow areas. Moreover, their light weight makes them very safe for flight around humans. However, making such small drones fly completely by themselves is an enormous challenge due to the extreme resource restrictions in terms of sensing and processing. In my talk, I will discuss the promises of novel neuromorphic sensing and processing technologies for autonomous flight of small drones, illustrating this with recent experiments from our lab. Specifically, I will delve into our multi-year effort to create a fully neuromorphic vision-to-control pipeline, going from raw events to low-level control commands. Recently, we have achieved this feat for optical-flow-based ego-motion estimation and control, implementing the spiking neural network on the Loihi Kapoho bay onboard of a free-flying drone.
Bio: Guido de Croon received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. His research interest lies with computationally efficient, bio-inspired algorithms for robot autonomy, with an emphasis on computer vision. Since 2008 he has worked on algorithms for achieving autonomous flight with small and light-weight flying robots, such as the DelFly flapping wing MAV. In 2011-2012, he was a research fellow in the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency, where he studied topics such as optical flow based control algorithms for extraterrestrial landing scenarios. After his return at TU Delft, his work has included fully autonomous flight of a 20-gram DelFly, a new theory on active distance perception with optical flow, and a swarm of tiny drones able to explore unknown environments. Currently, he is Full Professor at TU Delft and scientific lead of the Micro Air Vehicle lab (MAVLab) of Delft University of Technology.
For the meeting link, see the full INRC Forum Spring 2023 Schedule (accessible only to INRC Affiliates and Fully Engaged Members).