Links
(by Geoffrey Barrows)
Current collaborators (alphabetical order):
Javaan Chahl, Australian Defence Science and Technology Office and Australian National University. Dr. Chahl and Professor Srinivasan (below) together led a team to put real-time optic flow processing onto both fixed-wing and rotary-wing UAVs. My personal favorite is their demo of a helicopter hovering in place using optic flow. Anyone who has worked with rotary wing aircraft knows that they are extremely difficult to control. You should check out the Biorobotics web site at ANU.
Michael Dickinson, California Institute of Technology. Professor Dickinson studies the of the Drosophila (fruit fly), including behavior and aerodynamics. Centeye's aircraft currently avoid obstacles using the Drosophila's simple saccade behavior observed in Dickinson's laboratory. Find out more at the Dickinson Lab web site.
Ron Fearing, University of California at Berkeley. Professor Fearing is an expert on micro-mechatronics and is currently leading an effort to build a "micro flying insect", a 2cm aircraft based on the blowfly. Find out more about Professor Fearing's work here.
Sean Humbert, University of Maryland at College Park. Professor Humbert, with his graduate student Joseph Conroy, is studying the use of wide field of view optical flow measurements to help both rotary-wing UAVs and ground vehicles navigate through tunnels and obstacle fields. Find out more about Professor Humbert's work here.
Paul Oh, Drexel University. Professor Oh is a young professor and an expert on control theory who is studying flight control in small indoor slow-flier aircraft. Professor Oh's group has successfully integrated one of Centeye's Ladybug sensors into their aircraft, and is using this sensor to study autonomous take-off, landing, and obstacle avoidance. For more information, please check out Professor Oh's web site.
Small Vehicle Research Section, Naval Research Laboratory. We continue to work with our old friends at NRL.
Paul Samuel, Daedalus Flight Systems. Dr. Samuel's company specializes in developing high performance rotary-wing micro air vehicles, including for some ongoing Centeye research projects.
Phill Smith, Blue Bear Systems. Dr. Smith and his team from the UK are collaborating on a project to explore the use of Centeye's Ladybug sensors for a variety of applications in UAVs.
M. Srinivasan, Australian National University. Professor Srinivasan's laboratory has been studying how honey bees navigate through environments and perceive depth, using optic flow as a cue. When I first began my project to develop optic flow sensors back at the Naval Research Laboratory in late 1996, Prof. Srinivasan's famous paper describing how honey bees fly down the center of a tunnel was one of the first papers I read. Find out more about his work here.
Other groups or individuals of interest (Alphabetical Order):
Tobi Delbruck, Institute for Neuroinformatics, analog VLSI and neuromorphic systems
Ralph Etienne-Cummings, University of Maryland at College Park and Johns Hopkins University, analog VLSI and neuromorphic systems
Nicolas Franceschini, CNRS Marseilles, insect vision and implementation in mobile robots.
Reid Harrison, University of Utah, analog VLSI and neuromorphic systems. Professor Harrison implemented a nice chip that implements the Hassenstein-Reichardt circuit, a model of the neural processing that occurs in the fly's eye.
Chuck Higgins, Arizona State University, analog VLSI and neuromorphic systems. Professor Higgins has implemented in analog VLSI optic flow sensing circuitry and other circuits to extract features from the optic flow field.
Adrian Horridge, Australian National University, honey bee behavior. Professor Horridge's publications on insect vision and behavior have influenced our work.
Matt Keennon, Aerovironment, high-performance micro air vehicles.
Joerg Kramer, Institute for Neuroinformatics, analog VLSI and neuromorphic systems. The late Dr. Kramer's work inspired my own work when I first began this project. Whenever Centeye's aircraft are flying, they carry with them a tiny piece of Dr. Kramer's spirit.
Shih-Chii Liu, Institude for Neuroinformatics, analog VLSI and neuromorphic systems
Alireza Moini, formerly from the University of Adelaide, Australia. Moini's vision chips web page and his subsequent book on the same topic provide an excellent introduction to the field of vision chips.
Thomas Netter, insect vision and flight control. Dr. Netter integrated artificial insect vision to demonstrate terrain following in a tethered rotary-wing UAV. Nice work!
Tamas Roska, Hungarian National Academy of Sciences. Professor Roska and his many colleagues have led the effort to develop cellular neural networks.
Rahul Sarpeshkar, MIT, analog VLSI and neuromorphic systems. Professor Sarpeshkar is an expert in ultra low power analog design.
Bert Shi, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Cellular Neural Networks
Jean-Christophe Zuffery, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). Mr. Zuffery is a graduate student of Prof. D. Floreano in the Autonomous Systems Lab. In his research, he is studying the use of evolutionary algorithms to map visual motion cues into flight control signals. He has "closed the loop" in a blimp which is able to fly around a room without bumping into the walls. He aims to move this capability to indoor slow-flier UAVs.