A swarm of micro-quadcopters
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A swarm of micro-quadcopters
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#2Very cool, but notice what kind of room they fly in - they're using cameras to control the quadcopters, they're not autonomous, which means that if you put them outside, they wouldn't work.
Still, pretty damn impressive.
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#3Every time a see a new quadcopter video, I wonder to myself how long before local law enforcement starts using them.
I gratly fear a widely used, easily weaponized, remote controlled airforce that local enforcement officers can easily obtain.
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#4Every time a see a new quadcopter video, I wonder to myself how long before local law enforcement starts using them. I gratly fear a widely used, easily weaponized, remote controlled airforce that local enforcement officers can easily obtain.
The Air Force already lets local cops borrow their Predator drones. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/10/nation/la-na-drone-a...
These tiny drones are hard to arm, but they might be used for surveillance. Here's a more thorough report on the use of drones in the US: http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/report-protecting...
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#5Every time a see a new quadcopter video, I wonder to myself how long before local law enforcement starts using them. I gratly fear a widely used, easily weaponized, remote controlled airforce that local enforcement officers can easily obtain.
In Lithuania: http://goo.gl/72S2R
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#6Very cool, but notice what kind of room they fly in - they're using cameras to control the quadcopters, they're not autonomous, which means that if you put them outside, they wouldn't work. Still, pretty damn impressive.
Using a gyroscope, gps, accelerometer and some other sensors is not a difficult step to perform.
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#7Very cool, but notice what kind of room they fly in - they're using cameras to control the quadcopters, they're not autonomous, which means that if you put them outside, they wouldn't work. Still, pretty damn impressive.
Using a gyroscope, gps, accelerometer and some other sensors is not a difficult step to perform.
Actually ... that would be a very difficult step to perform. The room they fly in has a very expensive, sophisticated, high-speed motion capture system that gives a global picture of the placement of each vehicle. The data is then feed to a bank of computers for real-time processing. There's a reason they only show videos in that one room.
The data from individual sensors would be very noisy.
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#8Very cool, but notice what kind of room they fly in - they're using cameras to control the quadcopters, they're not autonomous, which means that if you put them outside, they wouldn't work. Still, pretty damn impressive.
Using a gyroscope, gps, accelerometer and some other sensors is not a difficult step to perform.
I completely disagree. None of those sensors would likely give anywhere near the accuracy, frame rate, or context of the current system. Also, there is the issue of where the computation is done. It seems obvious to me that the intended goal is a decentralized system, where every vehicle is autonomous and creates an internal model of its own surroundings. As best I can tell, in the current system all the computation and dispatching so instructions is done by a single centralized external computer (the one the external cameras are attached to).
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#9http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDmel
The "Aggressive Manoeuvres" videos remind me of something out of terminator.
Re: A swarm of micro-quadcopters
#10Very cool, but notice what kind of room they fly in - they're using cameras to control the quadcopters, they're not autonomous, which means that if you put them outside, they wouldn't work. Still, pretty damn impressive.
Using a gyroscope, gps, accelerometer and some other sensors is not a difficult step to perform.
It's pretty hard.
This assumes the existing radio links can handle the extra bandwidth. I don't see a WiFi card, so they may use radios with low-baud serial connections. Maybe the radios are good enough that doubling the radio communications is fine. Now, all the new hardware means extra draw (and potentially extra batteries) on each quadrotor. They might fly with this extra weight, but it won't be nearly as long.
Also, indoor flying means no GPS. In this case, using accelerometers means something is dead-reckoning the position of each quadrotor. There's no more space/power for processing juice, so the external system must do this. Now the external system must take this localized data from each quadrotor and place it in some global coordinate system (how does it do that?). It will use dead-reckoning to determine the position of each quadrotor. This means the system is accumulating errors over time, for each quadrotor. At least sailors could eventually correct their position with stars - there is no real global correction with these sensors. They could hypothetically do radio range estimation on the radio signals of the quadrotors, but who knows what kind of accuracy they will get.
Now I remember why I left robotics :-)