Publications by Timothy Stirling

Energy-Time Efficiency in Aerial Swarm Deployment

A major challenge in swarm robotics is efficiently deploying robots into unknown environments, minimising energy and time costs. This is especially important with small aerial robots which have extremely limited flight autonomy. This paper compares three d ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2013

Swarmanoid: a novel concept for the study of heterogeneous robotic swarms

Dario Floreano, Francesco Mondada, Daniel Burnier, Michael Bonani, Stéphane Magnenat, Philippe Rétornaz, Florian Christopher Vaussard, Timothy Stirling, James Roberts, Valentin Longchamp

2013

Indoor Navigation with a Swarm of Flying Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Timothy Stirling, James Roberts

Swarms of flying robots are promising in many applications due to rapid terrain coverage. However, there are numerous challenges in realising autonomous operation in unknown indoor environments. A new autonomous flight methodology is presented using relati ...

IEEE2012

3-D Relative Positioning Sensor for Indoor Flying Robots

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Timothy Stirling, James Roberts

Swarms of indoor flying robots are promising for many applications, including searching tasks in collapsing buildings, or mobile surveillance and monitoring tasks in complex man-made structures. For tasks that employ several flying robots, spatial-coordina ...

Springer Verlag2012

Energy-Efficient Indoor Search by Swarms of Flying Robots without Global Information

Timothy Stirling

Swarms of robots can quickly search large environments through parallelisation, are robust due to redundancy, and can simplify complex tasks like navigation compared to a single robot. Flying swarms can rapidly cover rough terrain and have elevated sensing ...

EPFL2011

Energy-Efficient Indoor Search by Swarms of Simulated Flying Robots Without Global Information

Dario Floreano, Timothy Stirling

Swarms of flying robots are a promising alternative to ground-based robots for search in indoor environments with advantages such as increased speed and the ability to fly above obstacles. However, there are numerous problems that must be surmounted includ ...

Springer Verlag2010

Energy Efficient Swarm Deployment for Search in Unknown Environments

Dario Floreano, Timothy Stirling

This paper introduces three strategies to deploy a swarm of robots in unknown environments for a search task, aiming to reduce the total swarm energy cost with rapid operation for applications such as disaster mitigation. We are motivated by current resear ...

Springer-Verlag2010

2.5D Infrared Range and Bearing System for Collective Robotics

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Timothy Stirling, James Roberts

In the growing field of collective robotics, spatial co-ordination between robots is often critical and usually achieved via local relative positioning sensors. We believe that range and bearing sensing, based on infrared technology, has the potential to f ...

2009

Quadrotor Using Minimal Sensing For Autonomous Indoor Flight

Dario Floreano, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Timothy Stirling, James Roberts

This paper presents a Miniature Aerial Vehicle (MAV) capable of hands-off autonomous operation within indoor environments. Our prototype is a Quadrotor weighing approximately 600g, with a diameter of 550mm, which carries the necessary electronics for stabi ...

2007