Wow, unions are gonna hate these.
Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
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Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#32This lab has several other videos with quad rotor robots like this (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM ), but don't worry about them escaping and starting a robot domination: they rely on infrared motion capture systems in that room for extremely precise location sensing. Once GPS gets sub-meter accuracy, then we should start worrying.
Solutions based on expensive IMUs [0], SLAM [1], or visual odometry are more realistic than GPS. As a rule, never use GPS for fine-grained control. Even ignoring accuracy, GPS fails when you lack line-of-sight to GPS satellites, which is extremely dangerous on a quadrotor - how do you safely land a flying chainsaw with no feedback? When finely controlling a platform, you need accurate relative position. The global position is usually unimportant when the platform's position on Earth doesn't matter.
Sensors designed for computer vision applications are surprisingly light and small! Board-level cameras can fit in the palm of your hand, and reasonable IMUs are not much bigger than a matchbox. The biggest obstacles today are tradeoffs between performance/weight and performance/battery life. The platform needs algorithms with acceptable results, requiring almost no supporting hardware, and that are robust to the thousands of things that go wrong when trying to sense (noise, errors, resolution, occlusions, etc). Algorithms that fit all of these requirements are very uncommon. In fact, I would not be surprised if there was an Iron Triangle in there somewhere.
[0] Inertial Measurement Units: Devices that estimate acceleration (or some other measure of movement).
[1] Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Using stereo vision, lidar, radio ranging, etc. to estimate your position, plus how the environment looks.
Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#33Imagine the damage virii of the future will be able to do to our infrastructure...
Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#34Great fun, but I suspect NIMBY concerns would kill any practical application. Let's imagine they get the machines scaled to the point when they could build an actual habitable structure, and that they sort the power concerns that I suspect would make it insurmountably uneconomic. Now, imagine a squad of sufficiently large and powerful helicopters buzzing away all day next to your office . How many people are going to…
Drones don't have lives, families, or seasonal affective disorder. There's no reason they can't work at night if it's less bothersome.
Oh, you'd rather have a helicopter next door while you slept?
Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#35This lab has several other videos with quad rotor robots like this (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM ), but don't worry about them escaping and starting a robot domination: they rely on infrared motion capture systems in that room for extremely precise location sensing. Once GPS gets sub-meter accuracy, then we should start worrying.
You can also use acoustic ranging, since sound travels at about 1 foot per millisecond. We did this with ultrasound at MIT -- http://nms.csail.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=9
You can get about 1cm of ranging error (median), and say 10cm of positioning error.
Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#36Pretty neat! I'm sure they'll get to it eventually, but there's no advantage to having three drones in this demo, since the work isn't pipelined. It seems that a drone has to wait until one finishes picking stuff up before it can pick up something itself.
Right, but they're saving travel time. When one drone is flying back to grab a piece, the next drone is lowering a piece into place.
Just like starcraft SCVs!
Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#37I'm going to be a pedant here - that does not look like a swarm, and they don't claim it is (in the video, at least). By "swarm" I would understand that all have the same programming and that the assembly process is emergent from simpler instructions plus exploration and feedback. Instead they appear to be programmed to act sequentially with a pre-planned set of actions. There is no feedback, no emergence. In short, it's nowhere near as cool as you seem to think it is. It's just a bunch of dumb machines doing exactly what they are told to do, with no smarts.
Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#38Great fun, but I suspect NIMBY concerns would kill any practical application. Let's imagine they get the machines scaled to the point when they could build an actual habitable structure, and that they sort the power concerns that I suspect would make it insurmountably uneconomic. Now, imagine a squad of sufficiently large and powerful helicopters buzzing away all day next to your office . How many people are going to…
Why couldn't small drones build things out of small elements? A lot of our assumptions about what is a reasonable unit of work are based on examples with humans in the loop. It might make more sense to think of a fleet of these things as a form of 3D printer.
Lots of them working together means active traffic management becomes critical to prevent collisions. That'll be regulated because even if they're moving things the size of bricks rather than I beams, do you want to see what happens when two hovering robots each carrying a brick 5 metres off the ground bump into each other and suddenly stop hovering? Or if they start creating turbulence for each other and interfere with flight even without contact? Even if it doesn't get regulated by law the insurance implications would force de facto regulation.
Lots of small components means more joints. With a brick as our example that's fine but I'm not convinced the gain over a squad of fairly cheap bricklayers is there - with a girder frame structure as is more typical for large commercial premises that means for the same design it's simultaneously weaker, heavier and more expensive. Not a trio of attributes I'd want to apply to my structure.
This is a sort of technology I love, that's clearly very interesting and with all sorts of potential. But I don't see construction as the ideal target market for it, by a long way. Freight unloading would have been a great case had it not gone containerised some years ago. Warehouse order picking as with Amazon et al? Perhaps. You can have the storage floor as a controlled space without people underneath which reduces the safety issues and there wouldn't be the same problem with noise nuisance. If we wanted to go down that road though I'm not sure it's a big enough win over cranes / arms and conveyor belts, or that either is a win over fairly cheap people pushing trolleys (having worked alongside exactly that in the past).
If we want to stick with construction it would make good sense for use in hazardous environments because it would provide a way of deploying a large, highly mobile force to an area where you couldn't deploy human labour (or where that deployment becomes severely impractical / unattractive for whatever reason - see the film 'Moon' for example), but I'm not sure that's a large enough market to justify the expense of developing the tech enough to make it fully usable. There doesn't seem to currently be a shortage of labour prepared to go and work in Siberian gold mines or northern Canadian tar sands quarries, for the right price, and I can't see the power technology for these devices scaling to the point to make them likely cheaper any time soon to invest in it.
Cool tech searching for a better application IMHO. I'd love to see that better application though and would be heading down there to watch when it happened.
Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#39This lab has several other videos with quad rotor robots like this (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM ), but don't worry about them escaping and starting a robot domination: they rely on infrared motion capture systems in that room for extremely precise location sensing. Once GPS gets sub-meter accuracy, then we should start worrying.
GPS + Accelerometer is already pretty darn accurate, I'm not really sure why they use the IR room. Perhaps simply easier to set up, and easier to co-ordinate the bots?
These things don't look very powerful, to put it mildly. GPS means outdoors which means wind which is a bit harder for a small, light hovering robot to handle. Indoor lets them demonstrate the principle with a useful simplifying assumption of no wind.
Re: Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drones don't have lives, families, or seasonal affective disorder. There's no reason they can't work at night if it's less bothersome.
Oh, you'd rather have a helicopter next door while you slept?
If it was next to my apartment building I'd want the drones to work during the day and if it was next to my office I'd want the drones to work at night. Most homes are not right next to office buildings. I wouldn't mind if the drones were a couple blocks away though.