Adaptation of Biological Solutions to MAVs in Gusty Urban Environments

Aurora Flight Sciences proposes a comprehensive set of sensing, estimation, and control techniques to enable urban flight in the face of gusts and other disturbances. Biological entities utilize a number of sensory mechanisms to insure stable flight with respect to their surroundings and reject disturbances. Some of these mechanisms are suitable for adaptation into engineering systems that are simple, lightweight, and provide information about the vehicles surroundings (situation awareness) that is complementary to the baseline sensors available on MAVs (gyros, accelerometers, etc.) Aurora’s R&D Center has already performed extensive research into these solutions and, with support from Harvard’s Microrobotics Laboratory, will combine them into an architecture which is practical, lightweight, and effective at avoiding the many large and small obstacles encountered during aggressive urban flight, even in gusty situations.