Smart Flying Robots

Chernyakov writes "MARVIN, a fully autonomous RC helicopter built by the Technische Universitaet Berlin, won the 2000 International Aerial Robotics Competition. MARVIN has a radio-linked ground station consisting of several networked Linux machines (which provide the computing power for vision, mapping and flight-course generation). The robots' mission is to fly into a disaster area complete with fire, water and smoke hazards, to locate and avoid threats to itself, to find bodies, distinguish from survivors and the dead, identify hazardous materials containers, determine if the container contents are radioactive, biohazardous, or explosive (by reading the labels), generate a detailed map of the disaster area, photograph the area, and return safely back to base. MARVIN pulled it off completely autonomously, with no human help or intervention. High quality (90 MB) and Low quality (12 MB) MPEGs of the robot are available."