Publications by Antoine Beyeler

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

Autonomous flight at low altitude using light sensors and little computational power

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and objects such as trees and buildings is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a serie ...

2010

Autonomous flight at low altitude with vision-based collision avoidance and GPS-based path following

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

The ability to fly at low altitude while actively avoiding collisions with the terrain and other objects is a great challenge for small unmanned aircraft. This paper builds on top of a control strategy called optiPilot whereby a series of optic-flow detect ...

IEEE2010

Vision-based control of near-obstacle flight

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

This paper presents a novel control strategy, which we call optiPilot, for autonomous flight in the vicinity of obstacles. Most existing autopilots rely on a complete 6-degree-of-freedom state estimation using a GPS and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) a ...

2009

Vision-based control of near-obstacle flight

Antoine Beyeler

Lightweight micro unmanned aerial vehicles (micro-UAVs) capable of autonomous flight in natural and urban environments have a large potential for civil and commercial applications, including environmental monitoring, forest fire monitoring, homeland securi ...

EPFL2009

optiPilot: control of take-off and landing using optic flow

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

Take-off and landing manoeuvres are critical for MAVs because GPS-based autopilots usually do not perceive distance to the ground or other potential obstacles. In addition, attitude estimates based on inertial sensors are often perturbed by the strong acce ...

2009

Near-obstacle flight with small UAVs

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

Autonomous flight in confined or cluttered environments such as houses or urban canyons requires high manoeuvrability, fast mapping from sensors to actuators and very limited overall system weight. Although flying animals are well capable of solving this p ...

Springer Verlag2008

Visual autopilot for near-obstacle flight

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

This present invention describes a novel vision-based control strategy for autonomous cruise flight in possibly cluttered environments such as – but not limited to - cities, forests, valleys, or mountains. ...

2008

Insect-inspired Autonomous Microflyer

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

2007

3D Vision-based Navigation for Indoor Microflyers

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

Fully autonomous control of ultra-light indoor airplanes has not yet been achieved because the strong limitations on the kind of sensors that can be embedded make it difficult to obtain good estimations of altitude. We propose to revisit altitude control b ...

2007

A 10-gram Vision-based Flying Robot

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Jean-Daniel Nicoud, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler, Adam Klaptocz

We aim at developing ultralight autonomous microflyers capable of freely flying within houses or small built environments while avoiding collisions. Our latest prototype is a fixed-wing aircraft weighing a mere 10 g, flying around 1.5 m/s and carrying the ...

2007

Vision-based Altitude and Pitch Estimation for Ultra-light Indoor Microflyers

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler, Claudio Mattiussi

Autonomous control of ultra-light indoor microflyers is a difficult and largely unsolved task because of the strong limitations on the kind of sensors that can be embedded. We propose a new approach for altitude control of a 10-gram microflyer, where altit ...

2006

Flying over the Reality Gap: From Simulated to Real Indoor Airships

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler

Because of their ability to naturally float in the air, indoor airships (often called blimps) constitute an appealing platform for research in aerial robotics. However, when confronted to long lasting experiments such as those involving learning or evoluti ...

2006

A 10-gram Microflyer for Vision-based Indoor Navigation

Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Jean-Daniel Nicoud, Dario Floreano, Antoine Beyeler, Adam Klaptocz

We aim at developing ultralight autonomous microflyers capable of navigating within houses or small built environments. Our latest prototype is a fixed-wing aircraft weighing a mere 10 g, flying around 1.5 m/s and carrying the necessary electronics for air ...

IEEE2006