Abstract
Drones are used in an increasing number of applications including inspection, environment mapping, and search and rescue operations. During these missions, they might face complex environments with many obstacles, sharp corners, and deadlocks. Thus, an obstacle avoidance strategy that allows them to successfully navigate in such environments is needed. Different obstacle avoidance techniques have been developed. Most of them require complex sensors (like vision or a sensor array) and high computational power. In this study, we propose an alternative approach that uses two simple ultrasonic-based distance sensors and neural control with synaptic plasticity for adaptive obstacle avoidance. The neural control is based on a two-neuron recurrent network. Synaptic plasticity of the network is done by an online correlation-based learning rule with synaptic scaling. By doing so, we can effectively exploit changing neural dynamics in the network to generate different turning angles with short-term memory for a drone. As a result, the drone can fly around and adapt its turning angle for avoiding obstacles in different environments with a varying density of obstacles, narrow corners, and deadlocks. Consequently, it can successfully explore and navigate in the environments without collision. The neural controller was developed and evaluated using a physical simulation environment.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ashour, R., Taha, T., Mohamed, F.: Site inspection drone: a solution for inspecting and regulating construction sites. In: Proceedings of the IEEE 59th International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, pp. 1–4 (2016)
Sanfourche, M., Le Saux, B., Plyer, A., Le Besnerais, G.: Environment mapping & interpretation by drone. In: Joint Urban Remote Sensing Event, pp. 1–4 (2015)
Pobkrut, T., Eamsa-ard, T., Kerdcharoen, T.: Sensor drone for aerial odor mapping for agriculture and security services. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Electrical Engineering/Electronics, Computer, Telecommunications and Information Technology, pp. 1–5 (2016)
Mori, T., Scherer, S.: First results in detecting and avoiding frontal obstacles from a monocular camera for micro unmanned aerial vehicles. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 1750–1757 (2013)
Sedaghat-Pisheh, H., Rivera, A.R., Biaz, S., Chapman, R.: Collision avoidance algorithms for unmanned aerial vehicles using computer vision. J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 33, 191–197 (2017)
Magree, D., Mooney, J.G., Johnson, E.N.: Monocular visual mapping for obstacle avoidance on UAVs. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, pp. 471–479 (2013)
Rohmer, E., Singh, S.P.N., Freese, M.: V-REP: a versatile and scalable robot simulation framework. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 1321–1326 (2013)
Grinke, E., Tetzlaff, C., Wörgötter, F., Manoonpong, P.: Synaptic plasticity in a recurrent neural network for versatile and adaptive behaviors of a walking robot. Front. Neurorobot. 9, 11 (2015)
Braitenberg, V.: Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1986)
Pasemann, F.: Discrete dynamics of two neuron networks. Open Syst. Inf. Dyn. 2, 49–66 (1993)
Kolodziejski, C., Porr, B., Wörgötter, F.: Mathematical properties of neuronal TD-rules and differential Hebbian learning: a comparison. Biol. Cybern. 98, 259–272 (2008)
Tetzlaff, C., Kolodziejski, C., Timme, M., Wörgötter, F.: Analysis of synaptic scaling in combination with hebbian plasticity in several simple networks. Front. Comput. Neurosci. 6, 36 (2012)
Neves, G., Cooke, S.F., Bliss, T.V.P.I.: Synaptic plasticity, memory and the hippocampus: A neural network approach to causality. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 9, 65–75 (2008)
Hülse, M., Pasemann, F.: Dynamical neural Schmitt trigger for robot control. In: Dorronsoro, J.R. (ed.) ICANN 2002. LNCS, vol. 2415, pp. 783–788. Springer, Heidelberg (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46084-5_127
Pasemann, F., Huelse, M., Zahedi, K.: Evolved neurodynamics for robot control. In: European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, pp. 439–444 (2003)
Zufferey, J.-C., Floreano, D.: Fly-inspired visual steering of an ultralight indoor aircraft. In: Proceedings of the Transactions on Robotics, pp. 137–146 (2006)
Franceschini, N., Ruffier, F., Serres, J., Viollet, S.: Optic flow based visual guidance: from flying insects to miniature aerial vehicles. INTECH Open Access Publisher (2009)
Toutounji, H., Pasemann, F.: Behavior control in the sensorimotor loop with short-term synaptic dynamics induced by self-regulating neurons. Front. Neurorobot. 8, 19 (2014)
Zahedi, K., Pasemann, F.: Adaptive behavior control with self-regulating neurons. In: Lungarella, M., Iida, F., Bongard, J., Pfeifer, R. (eds.) 50 Years of Artificial Intelligence. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4850, pp. 196–205. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-77296-5_19
Acknowledgments
This research was supported partly by Center for BioRobotics (CBR) at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and Startup Grant-IST Flagship research of Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science & Technology (VISTEC).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pedersen, C.K., Manoonpong, P. (2018). Neural Control and Synaptic Plasticity for Adaptive Obstacle Avoidance of Autonomous Drones. In: Manoonpong, P., Larsen, J., Xiong, X., Hallam, J., Triesch, J. (eds) From Animals to Animats 15. SAB 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10994. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97628-0_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97628-0_15
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97627-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97628-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)