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

Freakin awesome

[jhoegl]

In one of those clips, I imagined "space invaders", in real life.
Would be fun to play space invaders with swarms of things.

Re:Freakin awesome

[StikyPad]

More "fun" once they figure out how to arm them with tasers.

Re:Freakin awesome

[mdmkolbe]

Would be fun to play space invaders with swarms of things.

... until they start carrying live ammo.

Re:Freakin awesome

[TheInternetGuy]

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.

Re:Freakin awesome

[Spamalope]

In one of those clips, I imagined "space invaders", in real life.

I was thinking Galaga, especially with the back flip trick.

Where is my nerf gun?

Re:Freakin awesome

[Paracelcus]

"until they start carrying live ammo."
Think of the weponization potential! both offensive & defensive, avoidance strategies would be nearly impossible due to the large number of objects in close proximity & constantly in motion.

Swarms of tiny, cheap, flying bombs!

Amazing...

[stevenfuzz]

Until they realize they can band together to form a large man-eating mega bot.

I for one, blah blah blah

[artor3]

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.

Re:I for one, blah blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one, welcome those who strive to save us from "I for one, welcome ... " jokes...

Gonna find out who's naughty and nice

[Eightbitgnosis]

I see no way in which this technology could be used to invade the privacy of citizens across the world

Re:Gonna find out who's naughty and nice

[cavreader]

The Constellation project is already working on using swarms of integrated drones working together to cover the entire battle space. The F-22 already has this capabilities. But there won't be swarms of F-22's because of the cost but integrating data with 5 to 10 jets is already a reality. Creating a swarm of drones adds redundancy and they are way cheaper than F-22's. The computing and parallel processing systems are what makes the the F-22 so lethal and while the F-35 does share a lot of technology with the F-22 it is mostly limited to the geometry and stealth capabilities. You can see the stealth features by analyzing pictures. The internal command and control systems can not be deduced from looking at a picture. The US does not sale F-22's to other countries for a reason.

Speechless

[multiben]

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!

Link to the Upenn home page

[icebike]

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.

Re:Link to the Upenn home page

[0100010001010011]

UPenn does a LOT with these quad rotors. They seem to have some pretty smart grad students working on this in research.

One thing to point out is that this stuff doesn't always go as planned. Their Outtake Reel is pretty entertaining from "Oops" to "Oh shit there goes another few propellers."

Re:Link to the Upenn home page

[TheLink]

These flying bots remind me of you average Alaskan mosquito.

Those bots are not even half as advanced as a mosquito (and far from houseflies) though. Mosquitoes can fly for one to four HOURS: http://www.sove.org/Journal%20PDF/June%202004/Kaufmann.pdf

Mosquitoes can navigate and orient in dynamic environments without requiring external cameras and computers ( http://www.vicon.com/company/documents/UPENNGraspLab.pdf ). They can find their own sources of fuel, and avoid active and passive threats. They can even produce new mosquitoes in a few days/weeks without a factory.

They can get confused by bright/UV lights, but it's still quite impressive considering their brains are so tiny.

So these bots are interesting, but there's plenty of room for improvements :). We're still not in danger of Skynet bots yet...

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.

Re:Formations != Swarms.

[Kozz]

I think what the GP was trying to say was that it wasn't displaying what is sometimes called "emergent behavior". In this kind of tech, when we discuss "swarm" behavior, we're usually talking about individual entities that don't have very many rulesets except for things like "don't hit your neighbor", "don't hit obstacles", and "match your neighbor's approximate direction and velocity". You can see this in swarms of insects or birds (for example), and of course they're not communicating with each other on their planned trajectories, but the emergent behavior is fascinating.

(disclaimer: I'm no expert in this field, I just read lots of slashdot and others. someone will pipe up and correct my mistakes, which I welcome)

Re:Formations != Swarms.

[recharged95]

Bingo, they are presenting coordinated motion instead. They are close to a swarm, they are independent, but not sure if they are still commanded by a central computer (off-board), which means it's not a swarm by a mile. In hindsight, if they are playing back a script on-board each copter, it would be considered modeling swarm formation, but nothing close to flocking (there needs to be a leader quad).

Re:Slash-Old

[PPH]

Yeah. I hear the same complaint from a lot of people.

Do you all move in some sort of coordinated swarm or something?

Note the cameras, lights, and antennas.

[John Hasler]

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.

Re:Note the cameras, lights, and antennas.

[Laser Dan]

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.

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.

Ah Bollywood

[The_mad_linguist]

We aren't quite at the level of Indian Robot Endhiran yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBnl_krN_U

Re:Ah Bollywood

[Yvan256]

At 3m54s, there's this very specific "aaaaaaah!" yelling that I've heard in a lot of movies. Is that some kind of running gag between audio engineers or something?