| AVCAAF's goals are to develop basic research and technologies, enabling unprecedented capabilities for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) and small Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs). Potential missions we are contemplating are search and rescue, moving-target tracking, immediate bomb damage assessment, and identification and localization of interesting ground structures. Our work aims to allow such missions within very adverse environments, such as complex urban terrains, without substantial prior knowledge about these settings. This effort pulls together a large interdisciplinary team of researchers from several universities to address the challenges this research presents. Collectively, our team incorporates expertise in aerodynamics at small scales; rugged design and fabrication of MAVs and small UAVs; flight testbed development; mult-resolution filtering for adaptive bandwith vison processing, feature extraction and image denoising; real-time computer vision for control, image segmentation, object recognition and detection, and 3D scene estimation; real-time path planning in the face of uncertainty; and agile guidance, navigation and control. |
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