Flying Robots Flip, Swarm and Move In Formation At UPenn

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.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/L8nqiHpXA-U/flying-robots-flip-swarm-and-move-in-formation-at-upenn

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