Robustness Through Simplicity: A Minimalist Gateway to Neurorobotic Flight

In attempting to build neurorobotic systems based on flying animals, engineers have come to rely on existing firmware and simulation tools designed for miniature aerial vehicles (MAVs). Although they provide a valuable platform for the collection of data for Deep Learning and related AI approaches, such tools are deliberately designed to be general (supporting air, ground, and water vehicles) and feature-rich. The sheer amount of code required to support such broad capabilities can make it a daunting task to adapt these tools to building neurorobotic systems for flight. In this paper we present a complementary pair of simple, object-oriented software tools (multirotor flight-control firmware and simulation platform), each consisting of a core of a few thousand lines of C++ code, that we offer as a candidate solution to this challenge. By providing a minimalist application programming interface (API) for sensors and PID controllers, our software tools make it relatively painless for engineers to prototype neuromorphic approaches to MAV sensing and navigation. We conclude our discussion by presenting a simple PID controller we built using the popular Nengo neural simulator in conjunction with our flight-simulation platform.