This book demonstrates how bio-inspiration can lead to fully autonomous flying robots without relaying on external aids. Most existing aerial robots fly in open skies, far from obstacles, and rely on external beacons – mainly GPS – to localize and navigate. However, these robots are not able to fly at low altitude or in confined environments, and yet this poses absolutely no difficulty to insects. Indeed, flying insects display efficient flight control capabilities in complex environments despite their limited weight and relatively tiny brain size.
From sensor suite to control strategies, the literature on flying insects is reviewed from an engineering perspective in order to extract useful principles that are then applied to the synthesis of artificial indoor flyers. Artificial evolution is also utilized to search for alternative control systems and behaviours that match the constraints of small flying robots. Specifically, the basic sensory modalities of insects, vision, gyroscopes and airflow sense, are applied to develop navigation controllers for indoor flying robots. These robots are capable of mapping sensor information onto actuator commands in real time to maintain altitude, stabilize the course and avoid obstacles. The most prominent result of this novel approach is a 10-gram microflyer capable of fully autonomous operation in an office-sized room using fly-inspired vision, inertial and airspeed sensors.

This book is intended for all those interested in the autonomous robotics, working both in academic and industrial settings.

Preface - Foreword - Introduction - Related Work - Flying Insects - Robotic Platforms - Optic Flow - Optic-flow-based Control Strategies - Envolved Control Strategies - Concluding Remarks - Bibliography - Index.

With the challenges our society faces concerning energy and the environment, it is particularly vital to develop a more rational use of our resources, both renewable and non-renewable. A sustainable use of the available resources is only possible if engineers can rely on coherent indicators, among which the exergy efficiency is bound to play a major role.

Photovoltaic technology has now developed to the extent that it is close to fulfilling the vision of a “solar-energy world,” as devices based on this technology are becoming efficient, low-cost and durable. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of thin-film silicon, the most prevalent PV material, in terms of its semiconductor nature, starting out with the physical properties, but concentrating on device applications.

Solidication is one of the oldest processes for producing complex shapes for applications ranging from art to industry, and it remains as one of the most important commercial processes for many materials. Since the 1980's, numerous fundamental developments in the understanding of solidication processes and microstructure formation have come from both analytical theories and the application of computational techniques using commonly available powerful computers.

In recent years, the transport simulation of large road networks has become far more rapid and detailed, and many exciting developments in this field have emerged. In this perspective, the authors describe the simulation of automobile, pedestrian and rail traffic, coupled to new applications, such as the embedding of traffic simulation into driving simulators, to give a more realistic environment of driver behavior surrounding the subject vehicle.