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."

Comments

Formations != Swarms.

[Gabrill]

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.

These guys are doing some pretty cool work

[slimjim8094]

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.