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Flying Robots Flip, Swarm and Move In Formation At UPenn
techgeek0279 writes "The University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory has released a video of flying nano quadrotor robots. Inspired by swarming habits in nature, these agile robots avoid obstructions and perform complex maneuvers as a group."
In one of those clips, I imagined "space invaders", in real life.
Would be fun to play space invaders with swarms of things.
omg if someone doesnt make them reenact space invaders ill lose faith in humanity
Until they realize they can band together to form a large man-eating mega bot.
I know we don't have the collective willpower to skip the joke this time, so let's just get it out of the way.
I see no way in which this technology could be used to invade the privacy of citizens across the world
There is one thing I hate about stuff like this. It makes everything I do look so mundane. Congrats to those of you working on that team!
Cool stuff, but it needs a link to the home page: https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/
Very cool (and creepy) crawler bot video on the homepage.
These flying bots remind me of you average Alaskan mosquito.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
another good idea turned into a wepon.
Formation does not equal swarm. A swarm of insects doesn't have a known predetermined formation, nor does a flock of birds (not talking about duck v's). Impressive flight characteristics and preprogrammed flight formations, but I don't see anything that suggests you can tell it a destination in the wild and the group will be able to navigate there around random trees, buildings and other obstacles. For example the brick wall pass did not need the whole swarm to pass through the one window. A natural swarm would have flowed around as well as through, because each member would make an effectively random choice about which path to take.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
UPenn != Penn State. You fucking idiot.
For some reason, their hum sounds ominous to me. It's like something from a distopian future.
This video was on Google Plus a while ago.
These 'Tech' news sites are sadly lagging lately, they use to be a great aggregator for the creators, holding real releases of news.
Lately your either in a creator's actual network of connections on plus or your getting your tech news from a leeching blog aggregated by a leeching news feed.
Now /. is no different than Engadget, just profiting off a few creative folks willingness to share. ./ now feels the need to cover political crap and pointless unfunded no-win legal debates.
Except
It's becoming a little more apparent that our parent has left the room.
Manhacks
That's hardly something I would expect to see on Slash-Dot-Com young man. You have been a very naughty boy with your "Anon" comments and it's time for a spanking.I just may use football to spank you with since its so close and in the shower here with us.Bad! Bad!
...then you can also do it with these: http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/nucasx47b/index.html
1. Which country's flag is going to be on the ones coming for me?
2. Will it be bullets or sawblades?
This is not a swarm of robots cooperating. It's a single computer remotely operating a bunch of quadrotors. Impressive, but not what you imply that it is.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Hey all - These guys work down the hall from me. I don't work with them, but I've seen the lab.
Basically, it seems like it's a motion capture setup with IR cameras and some mostly off-the-shelf software to track 3D position (standard mocap stuff, which I have worked with). I think each drone has an IR emitter on it (you can see it in some shots since the camera has no IR filter). The novel thing here is the algorithmic work required in keeping track of each drone and planning out all the trajectories relative to the other bots (see the figure 8 demo at the end).
It's not going to fly through your window any time soon, unless you can fit a Kinect and some serious horsepower on there without going over the weight budget. But there's no reason to think that the algorithms wouldn't work to control the local bot, with some sort of ad-hoc mesh network for the synchronization.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
When I saw the "nano" attribute of these quadrotor robots I was hoping for them to be at most 1-2centimeters in the largest dimension.
Oh well.
Whoever makes a quad-rotor capable of carrying a pizza and two-liter bottle five miles will make a fortune competing with anyone who still delivers pizza in cars.
More than that, though: when we can switch from ground cars to robotic VTOL transportation for our daily commute, we're going to save a hell of a lot of energy, money, and lives. The hardware and flight control is a solved problem. All we need now is peer-to-peer traffic negotiation, and long-distance navigation.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Is this the same group that was throwing these quad rotors in a video on /. a year or two ago?
I can see this ending only in tears.
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
We aren't quite at the level of Indian Robot Endhiran yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBnl_krN_U
Does anybody know of a good way for me to build my own? I've seen designs for larger ones, but these small quadrotors look like they would be a bit easier for me to work with. I'm more of a software guy than a robotics guy, so designing my own from scratch would probably be a bit above my skill level. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
If these things can auto-land pads and recharge themselves, this would make a great Art installation!
I know that this technology will lead to some real life applications (like if they can be used to jointly move large objects. Maybe they can do things that even skilled human operators cannot and they may make "sky cranes" more practical). Still they are undeniably cool to watch so maybe they could be used in some kinetic 3D Art piece.
Or if not Art, why not Advertising? Get enough of them, put LEDs on them and you'll have a flying, reconfigurable 3D billboard. How about the Pepsi Logo? Or the AT&T "Death Star"?
On second thought maybe not, the night sky is already too cluttered.
Nano implies these are 10^-9 scale, so the question is, which quadrotors were they looking at, exactly, that these are nano?
what comes to mind when I saw the video was the phrase: "resistance is futile, you will be assimilated!" That buzzing sound of the motors could certainly become a bit ominous if the swarm of those robots is large enough to block out some sunlight. All in all, it has some wonderful potential -- for surveillance, fun, problem-solving in the field, and intergalactic domination...
In this case it just re-enforces the need to own a shotgun - 16ga with birdshot
Its not the years, its the mileage
My ex worked on stuff like this on a nasa fellowship. It involved real-time formations for satellites using some kind of sensor feedback loop using control theory.
looks like it will only work with stationary sensors surrounding the swarm
I don't think so
The swarm, for now, may still need a stationary beacon to give them a sense of location, but that does not mean they will forever need to home in stationary beacons to function
The beacon can be anything - and it could even be a UAV which guides them to their destination
The cruelty of future wars will only increase many folds, thanks to the swarming robots, I'm afraid !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... none!
How can they fly? 5 minutes? 10 minutes?
Those (not really) nano robots look more like a very expensive toy. IMHO.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
ever
They're not nano-sized robots, they're hand-sized.
And they're nothing new, it's just your average quadropter. You can buy that kind of thing (or just the parts) in any good shop on the internet.
The motion capture system is cheating, imho. Mocap machines can localize a point to mm accuracy. In the real world you are not going to have a localization system with that kind of accuracy. Localization, not control, is the hard problem.
Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Awesome book - worth a read if you haven't yet. It's amazing the technology he imagined and further envisioned practical uses for all the way back in 94/95. Now I'm off to program a set of these to fly around me in a protective formation....