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MIT Researchers Develop Autonomous Indoor Robocopter
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at MIT's Robust Robotics Group have developed a robotic helicopter capable of autonomously flying inside buildings or other GPS-denied environments. It has an on-board camera and a laser scanner that maps the local environment. The video talks about search-and-rescue and civil engineering applications, but it also brings somewhat scary reminders of Minority Report to my head. How long till I see one of these chasing me down a dark alley? The team's website has more videos showing earlier stages of the project."
Article just has some videos, but here's a few pictures of it.
And I suggest a good behaviour when they fly in - otherwise these machines will come in.
Good luck with that.
before they strap a Google camera to the things and start taking pictures of every corner of every building that doesn't have:
User-agent: * /
Disallow:
in it's robot.txt file.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
...dark alley...
Don't forget your night vision goggles, unless you are good at hitting things with your eyes closed.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Noise and power source are massive problems that aren't likely to go away. The real problem with all non airfoil type hovering vehicles is always going to be a power source dense enough. There are actually a number of ways to propel them if energy wasn't an issue. The robotics are impressive but it'll always be a boat in the basement until these issues are addressed. They used gas as fuel obviously for this test but you have the noise factor. Electric would be quieter but then you have battery weight. Even with Moeller's Skycar I think his 400 mile estimates are very unrealistic. Vertical take offs are always going to take a lot of power as does hovering. Cool stuff but I'll be far more impressed when some one can keep a device this size flying for 6 or 8 hours. 5 minutes with electric and 15 minutes on gas is probably the norm right now so there's a long way to go before we have to worry about Minority Report.
Did you RTFA? The navigation problem was greatly simplified by sharpening the blades, eliminating the need to go around walls.
"scary reminders of minority report"? What about scary reminder of fast rotating blades at neck altitude? People are in indoors too, and laser mapping or not, inertia and shit happens.
How long till I see one of these chasing me down a dark alley?
That depends on what you were planning, citizen.
This is interesting, although by using a quad-rotor helicopter, they seem to have mostly solved computer vision problem rather than a control system problem
Quad rotor and coaxial helicopters are very stable and have gotten pretty popular as entry-level helicopters because they are so easy to fly. The downside is that they don't really have the efficiency characteristics to fly outdoors like collective-pitch (e.g. like real full-size) helicopters.
Since the focus of the challenge was to fly indoors, using a quad-rotor is the natural choice. I'd like to have understood better how other teams failed and what kind of helicopters they used.
Collective-pitch helicopters, on the other hand, are extremely difficult to fly. Until the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter (http://heli.stanford.edu/), I believe no autonomous control system has been able to successfully fly one, even for very simple maneuvers.
> And follow what the people you elect have done and then support and advocate
> those that have the true intrests of the people at heart rather then just
> voting for the guy giving you 300 dollars or makes you feel good for a bit
> like Santa Claus but has no real plan.
Yeah, yeah, but I'm still going to carry a tennis racket. Just in case.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Did no one else see this vital application use?
Why a helicopter when you could use a blimp type device? Million times easier and more stable. And less fragile or dangerous.