Autonomous miniature flying robots: coming soon! - Research, Development, and Results

The exponential growth of the interest and investigations in UAVs is strongly pushing the emergence of autonomous MFRs. This article presented some developments in the ASL-MFR project. A new design methodology was introduced and applied to a quadrotor and a coaxial helicopter enhancing appreciably the robots characteristics by allowing 100% thrust margin and 30 min autonomy (respectively, 40% and 20 min for CoaX). An original concept of hybrid active and passive control is introduced for CoaX. A simulation software permitting rapid MFR reconfiguration and various testing conditions was shown. Finally, a simulation of an obstacle avoidance controller was presented. The numerous developments presented in this article reinforce our conviction in the emergence of autonomous MFRs.