Bio-Inspired Hovering Control for an Aerial Robot Equipped with a Decoupled Eye and a Rate Gyro

Augustin Manecy (1, 2) , S. Viollet (1) , Nicolas Marchand (2)

1 ISM - Institut des Sciences du Mouvement Etienne Jules Marey
2 GIPSA-SYSCO - GIPSA - Systèmes non linéaires et complexité

This work provides an hovering control strategy for a sighted robot, the eye of which being decoupled from the body and controlled by means of a tiny rotative piezo motor. The main purpose of this paper is to show the effectiveness and the efficiency of this fundamental bio-inspired mechanical decoupling. Indeed, it exhibits several benefits: * it enables to stabilize the robot's gaze on the basis of three bio-inspired oculomotor reflexes (ORs) : a visual fixation reflex (VFR), a translational and rotational vestibulo- ocular reflexes (tVOR and rVOR), * the eye can better, quickly and accurately compensate for sudden, untoward disturbances caused by the vagaries of the supporting head or body, * it yields a reference visual signal that can be used to unbias the rate gyro used to implement the VORs and to stabilize the hovering robot, * it increases the tracking accuracy with moving targets compared to without OR, This paper shows also that lateral disturbances are rejected 2 times faster with the decoupled eye robot, and roll perturbations induce a retinal error 20 times smaller. The occulomotor reflexes enables to cancel retinal error 6 times faster with 5 times lower retinal error picks. The conclusion of the paper is that decoupled eye must be considered as an efficient autonomous flight solution.

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Augustin Manecy, S. Viollet, Nicolas Marchand. Bio-Inspired Hovering Control for an Aerial Robot Equipped with a Decoupled Eye and a Rate Gyro. IROS 2012 - IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Oct 2012, Vilamoura, Portugal. pp.1110 - 1117, ⟨10.1109/IROS.2012.6385853⟩. ⟨hal-00714332⟩