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Technology and Research:

Our goal is to provide small robotic aircraft with the same type of visual sensing that flying insects have had for hundreds of millions of years. More specifically, we seek to provide small flying aircraft with the ability use optic flow to sense it's altitude and detect any obstacle in front of it, so that it may weave through an obstacle field to safety. As you will see below, we have made significant progress towards these goals. We have developed a class of optic flow microsensors that are appropriate for this task. We have also integrated these sensors with sub-100 gram aircraft and have demonstrated an aircraft that actually sees and avoids trees and buildings.

Find out more:

Please follow these links to find out more about our technology.
What is optic flow? Find out what optic flow is and why it is useful for airborne robotics in this brief tutorial that is written for the lay-person.
Vision Chips: A brief description of the vision chips used to implement our sensors.
Sensor Architecture: This slide summarizes the architecture of our current sensors.
Centeye Sensors: This slide shows some past and current sensors.
Survivability Enhancement for a Rotary Wing UAV: This slide depicts our concept for an optical flow sensor suite for rotary-wing UAVs. funded by DARPA Phase II SBIR W31P4Q06C0127.
Multiple Aperture Optical Systems: This slide depicts our concept for a Multiple Aperture Optical System (MAOS). Funded by AFRL/MN Phase II SBIR FA865106C0127.
Video Galleries: See videos of small aircraft performing autonomous altitude control and obstacle avoidance.

Old Photo Gallery: Older photo gallery from 2003.