Bio-Inspired Hovering Control for an Aerial Robot Equipped with a Decoupled Eye and a Rate Gyro

• Manecy Augustin
• Viollet S.
• Marchand Nicolas

This work provides an hovering control strategy for a sighted robot, the eye of which being decoupled from the body and controlled by means of a tiny rotative piezo motor. The main purpose of this paper is to show the effectiveness and the efficiency of this fundamental bio-inspired mechanical decoupling. Indeed, it exhibits several benefits: * it enables to stabilize the robot's gaze on the basis of three bio-inspired oculomotor reflexes (ORs) : a visual fixation reflex (VFR), a translational and rotational vestibulo- ocular reflexes (tVOR and rVOR), * the eye can better, quickly and accurately compensate for sudden, untoward disturbances caused by the vagaries of the supporting head or body, * it yields a reference visual signal that can be used to unbias the rate gyro used to implement the VORs and to stabilize the hovering robot, * it increases the tracking accuracy with moving targets compared to without OR, This paper shows also that lateral disturbances are rejected 2 times faster with the decoupled eye robot, and roll perturbations induce a retinal error 20 times smaller. The occulomotor reflexes enables to cancel retinal error 6 times faster with 5 times lower retinal error picks. The conclusion of the paper is that decoupled eye must be considered as an efficient autonomous flight solution.