Flying Robots Flip, Swarm and Move In Formation At UPenn 122
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."
Freakin awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Would be fun to play space invaders with swarms of things.
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More "fun" once they figure out how to arm them with tasers.
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Don't be stupid, these things don't look anything like sharks.
Re:Freakin awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Would be fun to play space invaders with swarms of things.
Re:Freakin awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Home beacon (Score:2)
looks like it will only work with stationary sensors surrounding the swarm
I don't think so
The swarm, for now, may still need a stationary beacon to give them a sense of location, but that does not mean they will forever need to home in stationary beacons to function
The beacon can be anything - and it could even be a UAV which guides them to their destination
The cruelty of future wars will only increase many folds, thanks to the swarming robots, I'm afraid !
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Then, call up Fry to fight them! [google.com] ;)
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Hilarious!!! :D
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"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!
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Cheap, unarmored and expendable, but small and hard to hit. I think I've heard of that formula before. Oh yeah ... it was how Doug Lenat beat the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron [newyorker.com].
(In fairness, his ships couldn't even move and these things can fly.)
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In one of those clips, I imagined "space invaders", in real life.
So I wasn't the only one? (I think it's the positioning of the rotors - they have the same basic shape as the invaders.)
If they're cheap enough, something like this would be fun for skeet shooting. Imagine the challenge of clay pigeons that can change trajectory on a dime!
It'd also be great for military training, too...
Might be because I just watched the Terminator movies again recently, but all of the uses I can seem to come up for these robots seem to involve shooting them with a high powered gun or rifle
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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?
oppurtunity (Score:1)
omg if someone doesnt make them reenact space invaders ill lose faith in humanity
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Tetris.
3D Tetris with helicopters inside the cubes.
Amazing... (Score:5, Funny)
Ah Bollywood (Score:5, Funny)
We aren't quite at the level of Indian Robot Endhiran yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBnl_krN_U [youtube.com]
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Ok that was just drenched in awesome sauce
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What does one say to a clip like that...mind bogglingly wild. That is a movie for a rainy weekend day with a good beer and chips
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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?
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Yes, that's the scream alright. Thank you.
I for one, blah blah blah (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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I know we don't have the collective willpower to skip the joke this time...
You patently don't, but why not give the rest of us the benefit of the doubt?
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'cause maybe he knows us better than that. personally i thought it was a nice spin.
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of them... um... doh.
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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.
I, for one, will mourn you when our swarming robotic overlords decide to punish you for this disrespect.
Gonna find out who's naughty and nice (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gonna find out who's naughty and nice (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:2)
Link to the Upenn home page (Score:5, Interesting)
Cool stuff, but it needs a link to the home page: https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/ [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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [youtube.com] is pretty entertaining from "Oops" to "Oh shit there goes another few propellers."
Re:Link to the Upenn home page (Score:4, Informative)
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 [sove.org]
Mosquitoes can navigate and orient in dynamic environments without requiring external cameras and computers ( http://www.vicon.com/company/documents/UPENNGraspLab.pdf [vicon.com] ). 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...
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"Mosquitoes can navigate and orient in dynamic environments without requiring external cameras and computers "
That is really the big one IMHO.
The video and acheivement is very cool. The video showcases challenging pre-programmed flight planning, software development, computer control system design, and device building.
I wonder how close are they to having the autonomous versions of the quadcopters pull this off?
Sigh.. (Score:1)
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Formations != Swarms. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Formation does not equal swarm.
Formation is from of a swarm.
A great number of things or persons, especially in motion. [reference.com]
Insects don't get the right to define human words in my book.
Re:Formations != Swarms. (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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Just like drone != robot. Language changes. Words change. Even in here, part of the high holy of geekspace...how many times have we seen the USAF drones (large RC aircraft) referred to as 'robots'?
'Robot' implies some independent decision making abilities. Or at least it used to.
Re:Formations != Swarms. (Score:4, Informative)
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).
Omminus (Score:2)
For some reason, their hum sounds ominous to me. It's like something from a distopian future.
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If not from the future, perhaps from your past visit to the lake.
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"Come with me if you want to live"
Re:Slash-Old (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah. I hear the same complaint from a lot of people.
Do you all move in some sort of coordinated swarm or something?
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Oh man! I knew these seemed oddly familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Thank you.
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If you can do it with tiny electric vehicles... (Score:2)
...then you can also do it with these: http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/nucasx47b/index.html [northropgrumman.com]
Note the cameras, lights, and antennas. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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A lot of the algorithms that get used for formation control are designed, inherently, from a distributed point of view -- meaning, they're based just on relative distances, etc, between the different quadrotors, and could run locally on them. However, when it comes time to actually implement this stuff, it's easiest to just run everything on a PC and use a mocap system, since that's usually viewed as a sufficient proof of concept within the community. There are groups in robotics who have strapped Kinects
Re:Note the cameras, lights, and antennas. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The part of the GRASP Lab's quadrotor work that has impressed me the most is simply the controllers they have for their quadrotors. They're not like wheeled robots in that respect; they're not even stable, passively. The lab's earlier videos (e.g., "Aggressive flight maneuvers") are still very cool. Certainly not dealing with perception parts of the problem, but that wasn't the point; the controllers were.
Of course, that's past research. What about this work? I assume it builds on those earlier control
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These guys are doing some pretty cool work (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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It's the kind of thing that makes you want to work with a group like this, just because it's so freaking cool. I can't imagine the amount of time spent to get these things to this level of organization, even for this short video.
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While everybody is complaining Google will snatch these guys up and employ them to direct multiple autonomous vehicles down our highways.
Adhoc mesh network indeed. It's called GPS augmented with cell towers.
Their vehicles already do the local collision detection.
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Yes you can tell by the environment they fly them in. First thing I noticed (other than the creepy flying things) was the drop sheet and the attempts to make a uniform environment, presumably to help the tracking system focus on the targets.
May I suggest next time they use GREEN drop sheets, and then project some interesting images on the green screens! :)
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First thing I noticed (other than the creepy flying things) was the drop sheet and the attempts to make a uniform environment, presumably to help the tracking system focus on the targets.
That, and to cover up all the crap they've got before their shiny video. :p
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We need that and viable human-lift capable VTOL transportation vehicles. Might be a slight problem, there.
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Is this the same group? (Score:2)
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Yes.
Longer answer: Probably. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/09/19/1811254/u-penn-super-quadcopter-learns-new-tricks [slashdot.org] and a few more. They've also been on "Penn & Teller Tell A Lie" and 'The Colbert Report".
Hmmmmm (Score:1)
I can see this ending only in tears.
Schematics? (Score:2)
This is (or should be) ART! (Score:2)
If these things can auto-land pads and recharge themselves, this would make a great Art installation!
I know that this technology will lead to some real life applications (like if they can be used to jointly move large objects. Maybe they can do things that even skilled human operators cannot and they may make "sky cranes" more practical). Still they are undeniably cool to watch so maybe they could be used in some kinetic 3D Art piece.
Or if not Art, why not Advertising? Get enough of them, put LEDs on the
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Thanks, although for just an "Art" piece such quick battery swap isn't required! ;)
Surveillance and other applications would probably find this essential.
Not Nano (Score:2)
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NANO is cool. Those pesky toys would like to be cool. So they need to be NANO.
For some reason... (Score:1)
Action demonstrates need - (Score:2)
In this case it just re-enforces the need to own a shotgun - 16ga with birdshot
bleh (Score:1)
My ex worked on stuff like this on a nasa fellowship. It involved real-time formations for satellites using some kind of sensor feedback loop using control theory.
And the real world usage would be ... (Score:2)
... none!
How can they fly? 5 minutes? 10 minutes?
Those (not really) nano robots look more like a very expensive toy. IMHO.
Not nano and nothing new (Score:2)
They're not nano-sized robots, they're hand-sized.
And they're nothing new, it's just your average quadropter. You can buy that kind of thing (or just the parts) in any good shop on the internet.
Motion Capture (Score:1)
The motion capture system is cheating, imho. Mocap machines can localize a point to mm accuracy. In the real world you are not going to have a localization system with that kind of accuracy. Localization, not control, is the hard problem.