Foldable and Self-Deployable Pocket Sized Quadrotor

Aerial robots provide valuable support in several high-risk scenarios thanks to their capability to quickly fly to locations dangerous or even inaccessible to humans. In order to fully benefit from these features, aerial robots should be easy to transport and rapid to deploy. With this aim, this paper focuses on the development of a novel pocket sized quadrotor with foldable arms. The quadrotor can be packaged for transportation by folding its arms around the main frame. Before flight, the quadrotor’s arms self-deploy in 0.3 seconds thanks to the torque generated by the propellers. The paper describes the design strategies used for developing lightweight, stiff and self-deployable foldable arms for miniature quadrotors. The arms are manufactured according to an origami technique with a foldable multi-layer material. A prototype of the quadrotor is presented as a proof of concept and performance of the system is assessed

Vision Tape - a novel class of flexible vision sensor for robots and humans

Vision Tape is a novel class of flexible compound-eye-like linear vision sensor dedicated to motion extraction and proximity estimation. This novel sensor possesses intrinsic mechanical flexibility that provides wide-range adaptive shape, allowing adjustable field of view as well as integration with numerous substrates and curvatures. Vision Tape extracts Optic Flow of the visual scene to calculate the motion vector, which allows proximity estimation based on the motion parallax principle