The Colloquium Series of the
            Department of Computer Science,
		  University of Wyoming

			presents

                       Dr. Paul Oh
                   Drexel University

  "Micro-Air-Vehicles for Flying in Near-Earth Environments"		     

               Thursday, November 18, 2004
	                ENG 1044
	             1:00 - 2:00 p.m.


                       ABSTRACT

Micro air vehicles are a new class of bird-sized aerial platforms. Called
MAVs, the envisioned purpose is to have them act as robotic front
observers that provide situational awareness in near-Earth environments
like forests, buildings, caves and tunnels. Unlike contemporary miniature
fixed-wing vehicles that fly in open air spaces, MAVs will be agile
vehicles that can fly slowly and safely in cluttered environments. Making
such airframes robotic demands sensor suites that can autonomously
navigate the vehicle. MAVs have severe payload constraints, demanding the
sensor suite be small, light and power-conscious. Additionally GPS,
lighting and communications are often degraded in near-earth environment.
As such, the sensor suite should operate in varied lighting and avoid
distributed wireless computing.

Flying insects, like honeybees, do not possess sophisticated visual or
inertial measureents systems. Instead they avoid obstacles, regulate
speed, compensate for wind gust, hover and follow terrain using optic
flow. This sensing modality is simply the apparent visual motion
experienced by an insect as it travels through the environment. Objects
that are close will tend to appear to move faster than objects that are
far away, and objects with which the insect are on a collision course will
tend to appear as if they are rapidly increasing in size. Optic flow
sensors, like those found in a computer mouse, are readily available. They
often weigh less than 10-grams, are coin-sized, draw milliAmps and can
interface with embedded microprocessors.

This talk details proof-of-concept results applying optic flow sensors on
MAV test beds. These 20-inch wingspan, 30-gram fixed-wing vehicles fly
indoors at speeds as slow as 2 m/s in areas as small as 10x10 square
meters. Demonstrations of autnomous avoid collisions, altitude regulation,
take off and landing are presented. The results are promising and suggest
broad impacts to all classes of unmanned aerial vehicles including
lighter-than-air blimps, rotary- and flapping-wing vehicles.

Bio:

Paul Oh is an assistant professor at Drexel's Mechanical Engineering
Department. He received his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering (Honors)
from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) minoring in Applied Mathematics
in 1989 and thesis in control-configured aircraft. Awarded a government
research fellowship, he received a Masters from Seoul National University
(Korea) in 1992, with a thesis in adaptive control of electrohydraulic
servomechanisms applied to gun-boat firing mechanisms. In 1999 he received
a Ph.D from Columbia University for the visual servoing of a 5-DOF gantry
hybrid robot for workcell monitoring. His current interests are in sensors
and mechatronic design. In 2004, he received an NSF CAREER award for micro
air vehicle control. He current chairs the IEEE Technical Committee on
Aerial Robotics.