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 non-linear flight dynamics. This ongoing project consists in developing a flying, vision-based micro-robot, a bio-inspired controller composed of adaptive spiking neurons directly mapped into digital micro-controllers, and a method to evolve such a neural controller without human intervention. This document 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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: EPIA
• Authors: Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Jean-Daniel Nicoud
• Keywords: Adaptive Spiking Neurons, EPIA 2003, Indoor Flying Project, Neural Controller