Pierre Duhamel, Judson Porter, Benjamin Finio, Geoffrey Barrows, David Brooks, Gu Wei, and Robert Wood. 9/25/2011. “
Hardware in the loop for optical flow sensing in a robotic bee.” In Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, Pp. 1099–1106. San Francisco, CA, USA: IEEE.
Publisher's VersionAbstractThe design of autonomous robots involves the
development of many complex, interdependent components,
including the mechanical body and its associated actuators,
sensors, and algorithms to handle sensor processing, control,
and high-level task planning. For the design of a robotic
bee (RoboBee) it is necessary to optimize across the design
space for minimum weight and power consumption to increase
flight time; however, the design space of a single component is
large, the interconnectedness and tradeoffs across components
must be considered, and interdisciplinary collaborations cause
different component design timelines.
In this work, we show how the development of a hardware
in the loop (HWIL) system for a flapping wing microrobot can
simplify and accelerate evaluation of a large number of design
choices. Specifically, we explore the design space of the visual
system including sensor hardware and associated optical flow
processing. We demonstrate the utility of the HWIL system
in exposing trends on system performance for optical flow
algorithm, field of view, sensor resolution, and frame rate.
Hardware in the loop for optical flow sensing in a robotic bee