Stefan Marti: Evolving autonomously hovering mobots

Free Flying Micro Platform and Papa-TV-Bot: evolving autonomously hovering mobots

Stefan Marti
The Media Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA USA 02139
stefanm@media.mit.edu

Notes: The author has written a more recent and extensive paper about FFMPs that includes this paper. There is also a website about a prototype. Back to the Free Flying Micro Platform (FFMP) and Papa-TV-Bot homepage.

Abstract

This paper outlines the possibilities, the evolution, and the basic technical elements of autonomously hovering micro robots. It consists of three parts. The first part presents the application Papa-TV-Bot, a free flying automatic video camera. The second part is a schedule for the longterm development of autonomously hovering mobots (small, mobile robots) in 8 phases. The third part describes the basic technologies of the vehicles of Phases 1 through 3.

Full Paper (.html)

This paper can be downloaded in the following formats:

Postscript file (.ps, 555KB)
compressed Postscript file (.ps.gz, 160KB)
Adobe Acrobat file (.pdf, 65KB)
Word97 file (.doc, 120KB)

I wrote this paper as a final project for MIT class 6.836 Embodied Intelligence, as well as for MIT class 21F.225 Advanced Workshop in Writing for Science and Engineering, during May 1998.

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