Picture this: small flying robots buzzing around your house, through caves or mines, into your amazed friend's office, into other dangerous and exciting areas... all autonomously.
That is what we're after here. Sebastian and I are working on a prototype UAV that senses its environment with sonar, infrared rangefinders, and a thermal imager. It does away with the inertial sensing and high-bandwidth control that most helicopter UAVs need. Instead, we use an inherently stable counter-rotating blade design. While it can't stabilize it's position or velocity, we are hoping that with it's simple proximity detection combined with behavioral-style control, we can get it to bounce around pseudo-intelligently. Our current goal is to get it to fly down the 100 foot tunnel between Newell-Simon Hall and Smith. The thermal imager may also make it an effective and annoying mosquito.