Publications by Jean-Christophe Zufferey

A method for ego-motion estimation in micro-hovering platforms flying in very cluttered environments

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod

We aim at developing autonomous miniature hovering flying robots capable of navigating in unstructured GPS-denied environments. A major challenge is the miniaturization of the embedded sensors and processors that allow such platforms to fly by themselves. ...

Springer Verlag2016

Aerial Locomotion in Cluttered Environments

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adam Klaptocz, Mirko Kovac, Jürg Markus Germann

Many environments where robots are expected to operate are cluttered with objects, walls, debris, and different horizontal and vertical structures. In this chapter, we present four design features that allow small robots to rapidly and safely move in 3 dim ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2016

Performance analysis of jump-gliding locomotion for miniature robotics

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Mirko Kovac

Recent work suggests that jumping locomotion in combination with a gliding phase can be used as an effective mobility principle in robotics. Compared to pure jumping without a gliding phase, the potential benefits of hybrid jump-gliding locomotion includes ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2015

Evaluation of control strategies for fixed-wing drones following slow-moving ground agents

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Maja Varga, Grégoire Hilaire Marie Heitz

There are many situations where fixed-wing drones may be required to track ground moving agents, such as humans or cars, which are typically slower than drones. Some control strategies have been proposed and validated in simulations using the average dista ...

Elsevier2015

Method to determine a direction and amplitude of a current velocity estimate of a moving device

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod

A new method for the estimation of ego-motion (the direction and amplitude of the velocity) of a mobile device comprising optic-flow and inertial sensors (hereinafter the apparatus). The velocity is expressed in the apparatus's reference frame, which is mo ...

2014

Vertical take-off and landing aerial vehicle

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz, Ludovic Daler, Arnaud Garnier, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski

A VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aerial flying vehicle comprising an inner frame, a gimbal system and an outer frame, the inner frame comprising a propulsion system and a control system, the propulsion system being able to generate a lift force. The ...

2014

A Collision Resilient Flying Robot

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski

Flying robots that can locomote efficiently in GPS-denied cluttered environments have many applications, such as in search and rescue scenarios. However, dealing with the high amount of obstacles inherent to such environments is a major challenge for flyin ...

John Wiley & Sons2014

Euler Spring Collision Protection for Flying Robots

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz, Ludovic Daler

This paper addresses the problem of adequately protecting flying robots from damage resulting from collisions that may occur when exploring constrained and cluttered environments. A method for designing protective structures to meet the specific constraint ...

2013

Testbed for Fast-Deployable Flying WiFi Networks

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Bixio Rimoldi, Alberto Jimenez Pacheco, Grégoire Hilaire Marie Heitz, Stefano Rosati, Karol Jacek Kruzelecki

EPFL's Information Processing Group (IPG) and Laboratory for Intelligent Systems (LIS), in conjunction with SenseFly (a LIS spin-off) recently started a project aimed at developing a testbed to experiment with self-organized wireless networks carried by au ...

2013

Beat-based synchronization and steering for groups of fixed-wing flying robots

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Sabine Hauert, Severin Leven

Groups of fixed-wing robots can benefit from moving in synchrony to share sensing and communication capabilities, avoid collisions or produce visually pleasing choreographies. For this reason, we provide a strategy to produce global group movement that can ...

2013

Contact-based navigation for an autonomous flying robot

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz, Arnaud Garnier, Marco Pagnamenta, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski

Autonomous navigation in obstacle-dense indoor environments is very challenging for flying robots due to the high risk of collisions, which may lead to mechanical damage of the platform and eventual failure of the mission. While conventional approaches in ...

2013

Beat-Based Synchronization and Steering for Groups of Fixed-Wing Flying Robots

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Sabine Hauert, Severin Leven

Groups of fixed-wing robots can benefit from moving in synchrony to share sensing and communication capabilities, avoid collisions or produce visually pleasing choreographies. Synchronous motion is especially challenging when using fixed-wing robots that r ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2013

Optic-Flow Based Control of a 46g Quadrotor

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod

We aim at developing autonomous miniature hov- ering flying robots capable of navigating in unstructured GPS- denied environments. A major challenge is the miniaturization of the embedded sensors and processors allowing such platforms to fly autonomously. ...

2013

Automatically calibrating the viewing direction of optic-flow sensors

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod

Because of their low weight, cost and energy consumption, optic-flow sensors attract growing interest in robotics for tasks such as self-motion estimation or depth measurement. Most applications require a large number of these sensors, which involves a fai ...

IEEE2012

Indoor Navigation with a Swarm of Flying Robots

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, James Roberts, Timothy Stirling

Swarms of flying robots are promising in many applications due to rapid terrain coverage. However, there are numerous challenges in realising autonomous operation in unknown indoor environments. A new autonomous flight methodology is presented using relati ...

IEEE2012

The AirBurr: A Flying Robot That Can Exploit Collisions

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz

Research made over the past decade shows the use of increasingly complex methods and heavy platforms to achieve autonomous flight in cluttered environments. However, efficient behaviors can be found in nature where limited sensing is used, such as in insec ...

2012

An Active Uprighting Mechanism for Flying Robots

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz, Ludovic Daler

Flying robots have unique advantages in the exploration of cluttered environments such as caves or collapsed buildings. Current systems however have difficulty in dealing with the large amount of obstacles inherent to such environments. Collisions with obs ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2012

Implementation of a Wireless Mesh Network of Ultra Light MAVs with Dynamic Routing

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Bixio Rimoldi, Yannick Gasser, Alberto Jimenez Pacheco

This paper describes the implementation and characterisation of a mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) of ultra-light intelligent flying robots. The flying nature of the network makes it suitable to collect or disseminate content in urban areas or challenging ter ...

2012

3-D Relative Positioning Sensor for Indoor Flying Robots

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, James Roberts, Timothy Stirling

Swarms of indoor flying robots are promising for many applications, including searching tasks in collapsing buildings, or mobile surveillance and monitoring tasks in complex man-made structures. For tasks that employ several flying robots, spatial-coordina ...

Springer Verlag2012

The Accuracy of Automatic Photogrammetric Techniques on Ultra-light UAV Imagery

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, François Gervaix, Dario Floreano, Pascal Fua, Antoine Beyeler, Olivier Küng, Christoph Strecha

This paper presents an affordable, fully automated and accurate mapping solutions based on ultra-light UAV imagery. Several datasets are analysed and their accuracy is estimated. We show that the accuracy highly depends on the ground resolution (flying hei ...

2011