Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Petri Tanskanen is a pioneering researcher in autonomous micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) and vision-based robotics, whose work has fundamentally advanced the capabilities of small-scale flying robots in GPS-denied environments. His most influential contributions center on developing complete system architectures for vision-controlled micro helicopters, enabling them to autonomously navigate, map, and explore complex indoor and outdoor spaces without external positioning references. Tanskanen’s 2014 paper on vision-controlled micro flying robots has garnered 297 citations, establishing it as a cornerstone reference in the field. He also co-developed the PIXHAWK open-source computer vision framework for MAVs, which has become a critical tool for researchers worldwide, and created an open-source optical flow CMOS camera that revolutionized velocity and position estimation for mobile robots (272 citations). As a key contributor to the EU-funded SFly project, Tanskanen helped pioneer swarm intelligence for MAVs, demonstrating how multiple autonomous flying robots can collaboratively map unknown environments and optimize surveillance positions. His work on real-time velocity estimation using optical flow and disparity matching (53 citations) provided essential algorithms for robust MAV control. Through his open-source contributions and system-level innovations, Tanskanen has enabled a new generation of autonomous flying robots for search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and security surveillance.