Slashdot Mirror
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 fact they are probably so cheap that you only need to load them with plastic explosives and send your little swarm of kamikaze robots to rain down on your enemy. I cant put my finger on it, but there is something very angry birds about this.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
... because vertical flight is so much more energy efficent, cheaper and safer than rolling along the ground ...
Do you not realize that collision avoidance becomes rather more difficult when the things you're trying to avoid colliding with are themselves moving? They're not setting up a pattern to fly in, the computer is calculating trajectories for each robot such that they won't interfere with each other at any point in the future. A rather taller order.
What collision avoidance?
They are all externally controlled, and the controller knows their position to within a few mm due to the very expensive vicon system they are using.
All they are doing is moving along preplanned and precalculated trajectories.
As a robotics researcher I'm not really impressed.
External control and localisation removes 99% of of the difficulty of the problem.
It also makes this research useless for any actual real-world function, it's only good for fancy demos in their specially prepared room.
If they did that with only onboard sensors and control, THEN I would be impressed.