A swarm of micro-quadcopters

http://hackaday.com/2012/02/03/dog-pod-grid-one-step-closer-to-reality/

by m_for_monkey • 14 years ago

167 42 14 years ago

theon1442• 14 years ago

Very 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.

gbrindisi• 14 years ago

Using a gyroscope, gps, accelerometer and some other sensors is not a difficult step to perform.

gallamine• 14 years ago

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.

baddox2• 14 years ago

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).

jakevoytko• 14 years ago

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 :-)

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

There might still be some practical uses that do not require complete autonomy. I can imagine e.g. fleets of such quadrocopters flying inside buildings, tied to security cameras. Law enforcement would probably love this.

bwarp• 14 years ago

ONLY law enforcement will love this. Everyone else will want to run to the hills.

orofino• 14 years ago

Every 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.

sp332• 14 years ago

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...

povilas• 14 years ago

In Lithuania: http://goo.gl/72S2R

_djo_3• 14 years ago

Surveillance drones were already used by the police in South Africa during the national elections back in 1994, in that case on loan from the Air Force. After further successful deployments in the years since, the SA Police Service is considering issuing an RFP for a small UAV fleet.

Conceptually, surveillance-only UAVs are not dissimilar from police helicopters, which have been used for decades without massive privacy issues. In fact, when evaluating the option between acquiring a larger UAV platform or additional manned helicopters with high-end electro-optical camera gear for the Football World Cup, the local police went went for the helicopters as they performed better in that specific role and there was no cost saving.

I don't see much chance of police departments weaponising UAVs any time soon either. Not only does it push up the cost significantly, but there are accuracy and liability issues that will take some time to sort out. At most I could see helicopter-based UAVs being used to drop tear-gas near crowds and even that's iffy.

regularfry2• 14 years ago

They're closer in concept (and presumably in deployment scale) to mobile CCTV cameras than they are to police helicopters, and there certainly have been privacy issues with those.

ams6110• 14 years ago

A police helicopter can't easily land on your window ledge and observe (with audio) what's going on inside for an extended period of time.

ceejayoz• 14 years ago

I just wonder how long it is until someone sends a couple dozen of these at a President's outdoor podium.

ken• 14 years ago

Seattle already has them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI13yDN2gi0

xd• 14 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDmel

The "Aggressive Manoeuvres" videos remind me of something out of terminator.

plessthanpt05• 14 years ago

first thought exactly...just throw in a dash of skynet and, well, yup...

peregrine• 14 years ago

I wonder when they will implement the flocking behavior we see with birds and in boid algorithms. ex http://processing.org/learning/topics/flocking.html

Obviously their will need to be a collision penalty but one would think this kind of behavior would be easy to do.

th0ma5• 14 years ago

Anyone have some tips on the small components? Most of what I seem to find on the drone forums is about larger devices, maybe upwards of a foot and a half or two feet across.

bri3d• 14 years ago

http://wiki.openpilot.org/display/Doc/BumbleBee this parts BOM (from HobbyKing, mostly, so it's cheap) gives you a basic idea of what you'd need.

I built a similar quad using PCB milled on a homemade drill press for the center plate (rather than buying it laser cut).

ahelwer• 14 years ago

I enjoy how references to The Diamond Age are becoming more and more common in tech beloved by the hacker community. Increases my excitement for the future! I want my matter compiler already.

snowwrestler• 14 years ago

It's interesting to reread The Diamond Age in the context of the recent fights over IP. When manufacturing is almost free, what gives one object value over another? Its design and software--the IP. In TDA, stealing IP was how smaller organizations competed with and disrupted larger more established ones. No organization in the world is larger and more established than the U.S.--hence the increasingly strong efforts of the U.S. government to defend IP.

steve89182• 14 years ago

I very much would love to set up a bunch of these quadrocopters to circle my house and use them as security cameras. I'm not sure how long it would take for that, but if you could set up something like 20 of these, have them continuously rotate around the house perimeter, recording everything, and then come back to recharge with another one taking off, I think that would be pretty awesome.

m_for_monkey2• 14 years ago

I think it's pretty paranoid. Why would you do that?

steve89182• 14 years ago

For fun! I think it would be pretty cool project to program those drones, etc. I'm pretty sure the security benefits would be low, and like someone else said, kids throwing stuff at it would suck. But then you can program in counter measure, maybe a water cannon, etc...

rewind• 14 years ago

I hope you don't have any kids with slingshots in your neighborhood. You just invented the best game ever.

m_for_monkey2• 14 years ago

Unless the drones can defend themselves...

larrys• 14 years ago

As someone who flys rc helicopters (both gas and electric) I can assure you that quadracopters of that size in no way could hold up under wind speed that would be typical from day to day. And making them larger would present a safety hazard.

dhughes• 14 years ago

I found that incredible, amazing, stunning but also hilarious for some reason. I don't know why but it funny seeing them all working together like that.

cs702• 14 years ago

The same video was posted a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3542542

eik3_de• 14 years ago

and before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3541996

A swarm of micro-quadcopters

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