| Hardware description
Melissa is developed
as a robot platform for Flying Robot Project which is a part of Biorobotics
research at AILab,
Dept.
of Information Technology,
Univ. of
Zurich.
 
The flying robot Melissa
is a blimp-like flying robot, which consists of a helium balloon, a gondola
hosting the onboard electronics, and a host computer. The balloon is 2.3m
long and has a lift capacity of approximately 400g. Inside the gondola
(Right picture), there are 3 motors for rotation, elevation and thrust
control, a four-channel radio transmitter, a miniature panoramic vision
system, and the batteries.
 
We developed a miniature
panoramic vision system, which consists of panoramic mirror, a CCD camera
module, and the housing components (Left picture). The system was designed
to weight no more than 90 g in total so that we could later integrate it
to the flying robot. The panoramic mirror was developed based on a panoramic
optics study [Chahl et al. 1997] and it has a hyperbolic surface that provides
a visual field of 360 degrees on horizontal plane and 260 degrees vertically.
Right picture shows typical landscape obtained by this vision system in
natural environment.
The control process of
Melissa can be decomposed in three basic steps. First, the video signal
from the CCD camera attached to the gondola is transmitted to the host
computer via a wireless video link. Second, the images are then digitized
on the host computer that also performs the image processing in order to
determine the target motor command. And third, the motor command is sent
to the gondola also via radio transmission.
|
| Reference
Chahl, J. S., Srinivasan,
M. V., gReflective surfaces for panoramic imaging,h Applied Optics, vol.
36, No. 31, pp. 8275-8285, 1997
|
Flying
Robot:Melissa