The sFly project is featured at TEDx Zurich

Prof. Davide Scaramuzza leader of the sFly project and former member of the Autonomous Systems Lab was invited to TEDx Zurich to present the results of the recently finished project sFly. At the end of the talk Markus Achtelik, Stephan Weiss and Simon Lynen collaborators within sFly were presenting the performance of the helicopter with a live demo.

Watch the video external pageherecall_made.

This talk is about our autonomous, vision-controlled micro flying robots. Potential applications of these robots are e.g. search and rescue, inspection and environment monitoring.

Indeed, in order to be truly autonomous, current flying robots rely on GPS or motion-capture systems. Unfortunately, GPS does not work indoors, while motion-capture systems require prior modification of the environment where the robots are supposed to operate, which is not possible in environments that are still to be explored. Therefore, the idea of sFly consists of using just a single cameras onboard the robot which is combined with readings from an inertial measurement unit in an extended Kalman filter framework.

This talk presents our progress towards this endeavor, open challenges, and future applications.