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A Novel Time-of-Flight Range and Bearing Sensor System for Micro Air Vehicle Swarms

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Swarm Intelligence (ANTS 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13491))

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel range and bearing sensing (RnB) system for micro-air vehicle (MAV) swarms. The RnB system uses 12 infrared (IR) time-of-flight (ToF) sensors and measures the range and bearing of obstacles and other MAVs. The system incorporated hardware and software filtering to remove ambient noise and interference between different sensors to distinguish between obstacles and kin MAVs. The overall system is 50 mm wide and weighs 12.5 gram. We have installed the system on 5 indoor quadrotors and demonstrated the performance of the RnB system using flocking behavior. To the best of our knowledge, our system is the first IR ToF sensor-based RnB system designed specifically for swarms that enabled the first decentralized flocking on indoor MAVs using only on-board resources.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Link to open source hardware/software repository.

  2. 2.

    Link to experiment videos with 5 MAVs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by the EU H2020-FET RoboRoyale (964492).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

    Cem Bilaloğlu, Mehmet Şahin & Ali Emre Turgut

  2. Department of Computer Science, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Farshad Arvin

  3. Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

    Erol Şahin

  4. Center for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (ROMER), Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

    Cem Bilaloğlu, Mehmet Şahin & Ali Emre Turgut

Authors
  1. Cem Bilaloğlu
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  2. Mehmet Şahin
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  3. Farshad Arvin
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  4. Erol Şahin
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  5. Ali Emre Turgut
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Cem Bilaloğlu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Marco Dorigo

  2. University of Lübeck, Lübeck, Germany

    Heiko Hamann

  3. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Manuel López-Ibáñez

  4. University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    José García-Nieto

  5. Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Andries Engelbrecht

  6. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA, USA

    Carlo Pinciroli

  7. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Volker Strobel

  8. Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

    Christian Camacho-Villalón

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Bilaloğlu, C., Şahin, M., Arvin, F., Şahin, E., Turgut, A.E. (2022). A Novel Time-of-Flight Range and Bearing Sensor System for Micro Air Vehicle Swarms. In: Dorigo, M., et al. Swarm Intelligence. ANTS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13491. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20176-9_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20176-9_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20175-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20176-9

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