BioMAV: The Website
The BioMAV team of the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands participates in the IMAV conference and competition in the summer of 2011 (please see the next paragraph for a proper introduction to the IMAV). This blog keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments, explains some of our cool experiments, and shows some of top-secret and jaw-dropping features we implement in our Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.
You can find all our posts on the Blog page. We do our best to make the posts as readable as possible (i.e. accessible to a large audience). Please feel free to ask any questions you might have and/or let us know what you think of our approach. You can do this by posting a comment to a post.
IMAV (Conference and Competition)
The International Micro Air Vehicle conference and competitions 2011 (IMAV) will be held in September 2011 in the Netherlands. It is the most prestigious conference and competition in the area of Micro Air Vehicles. The Radboud University will participate in both the conference and the competitions, with a UAV that flies autonomously on the basis of biologically inspired algorithms.
The BioMAV team consists of students from the Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands) that are doing their Master studies or finalizing their Bachelor in Artificial Intelligence (Kunstmatige Intelligentie). An overview of the members can be found here: Team. The name of the team, BioMAV, reflects the focus on biologically inspired algorithms.
Parrot AR.Drone
The platform that we use is the Parrot AR.Drone, as shown in the image on the left. You can find lots of images and cool movies on Google and YouTube. The competition in which the team will participate is the Indoor Pylon Racing, in which the UAV has to fly 8-shaped figures around two poles in an indoor environment (click here for more information).
Flying 8-shaped figures around two poles might sound like an easy task to perform, but it poses some interesting challenges. How do I pass a pole? How do I detect a pole? How can I see? How can I even fly? We aim to overcome (most of) these challenges by taking inspiration from biology in designing algorithms.
Links:
http://www.imav2011.org/
http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/usa/