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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.
Until they realize they can band together to form a large man-eating mega bot.
I see no way in which this technology could be used to invade the privacy of citizens across the world
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.
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.
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.
I for one, welcome those who strive to save us from "I for one, welcome ... " jokes...
We aren't quite at the level of Indian Robot Endhiran yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBnl_krN_U
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.