Flying insect inspired vision for autonomous aerial robot maneuvers in near-earth environments

Near-earth environments are time consuming, labor intensive and possibly dangerous to safe guard. Accomplishing tasks like bomb detection, search-and-rescue and reconnaissance with aerial robots could save resources. This work describes the adoption of insect behavior and flight patterns to develop a MAV sensor suite. A prototype called CQAR: closed quarter aerial robot, which is capable of flying in and around buildings, through tunnels and in and out of caves is used to validate the efficiency of such a method when equipped with optic flow microsensors.