Publications by Jean-Christophe Zufferey

A method for ego-motion estimation in micro-hovering platforms flying in very cluttered environments

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adrien Briod

We aim at developing autonomous miniature hovering flying robots capable of navigating in unstructured GPS-denied environments. A major challenge is the miniaturization of the embedded sensors and processors that allow such platforms to fly by themselves. ...

Springer Verlag2016

Aerial Locomotion in Cluttered Environments

Dario Floreano, Mirko Kovac, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adam Klaptocz, Jürg Markus Germann

Many environments where robots are expected to operate are cluttered with objects, walls, debris, and different horizontal and vertical structures. In this chapter, we present four design features that allow small robots to rapidly and safely move in 3 dim ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2016

Performance analysis of jump-gliding locomotion for miniature robotics

Dario Floreano, Mirko Kovac, Jean-Christophe Zufferey

Recent work suggests that jumping locomotion in combination with a gliding phase can be used as an effective mobility principle in robotics. Compared to pure jumping without a gliding phase, the potential benefits of hybrid jump-gliding locomotion includes ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2015

Evaluation of control strategies for fixed-wing drones following slow-moving ground agents

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Grégoire Hilaire Marie Heitz, Maja Varga

There are many situations where fixed-wing drones may be required to track ground moving agents, such as humans or cars, which are typically slower than drones. Some control strategies have been proposed and validated in simulations using the average dista ...

Elsevier2015

Method to determine a direction and amplitude of a current velocity estimate of a moving device

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adrien Briod

A new method for the estimation of ego-motion (the direction and amplitude of the velocity) of a mobile device comprising optic-flow and inertial sensors (hereinafter the apparatus). The velocity is expressed in the apparatus's reference frame, which is mo ...

2014

Vertical take-off and landing aerial vehicle

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski, Ludovic Daler, Arnaud Garnier

A VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aerial flying vehicle comprising an inner frame, a gimbal system and an outer frame, the inner frame comprising a propulsion system and a control system, the propulsion system being able to generate a lift force. The ...

2014

A Collision Resilient Flying Robot

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adrien Briod, Przemyslaw Mariusz Kornatowski

Flying robots that can locomote efficiently in GPS-denied cluttered environments have many applications, such as in search and rescue scenarios. However, dealing with the high amount of obstacles inherent to such environments is a major challenge for flyin ...

John Wiley & Sons2014

Euler Spring Collision Protection for Flying Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adrien Briod, Adam Klaptocz, Ludovic Daler

This paper addresses the problem of adequately protecting flying robots from damage resulting from collisions that may occur when exploring constrained and cluttered environments. A method for designing protective structures to meet the specific constraint ...

2013

Testbed for Fast-Deployable Flying WiFi Networks

Dario Floreano, Bixio Rimoldi, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Stefano Rosati, Grégoire Hilaire Marie Heitz, Karol Jacek Kruzelecki, Alberto Jimenez Pacheco

EPFL's Information Processing Group (IPG) and Laboratory for Intelligent Systems (LIS), in conjunction with SenseFly (a LIS spin-off) recently started a project aimed at developing a testbed to experiment with self-organized wireless networks carried by au ...

2013

Beat-based synchronization and steering for groups of fixed-wing flying robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Sabine Hauert, Severin Leven

Groups of fixed-wing robots can benefit from moving in synchrony to share sensing and communication capabilities, avoid collisions or produce visually pleasing choreographies. For this reason, we provide a strategy to produce global group movement that can ...

2013