Photo courtesy of Vijay Kumar.
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Some of the biggest leaps in aerial mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania have come straight out of professor Vijay Kumar’s mechanical engineering lab. The small, unmanned aircraft developed by Kumar and his team are just eight inches in diameter and weigh in at a little over a tenth of a pound. Four rotors surround a central processor that guides the pitch, yaw and direction of the small quadricopters, which can be manned remotely.
Kumar foresees multiple applications for his tiny craft, including building structures through coordinated efforts: An algorithm can explicitly tell the robots which parts of a structure to pick up, where to place them down, and when to do so. And just like the collective intelligence of an ant colony carrying food to the hive, Kumar’s robots can autonomously coordinate their positions across a group of machines without the aid of any central coordinator — all by sensing the positions of nearby craft, adjusting, and moving accordingly.
As you can imagine, the implications of the project’s application are widespread. In architectural applications alone — from simple construction to navigating buildings remotely — the possibilites are limitless.
But these are humdrum next to the robots’ fantastic performance of the James Bond theme across multiple instruments — as seen below — programmed and coordinated by two of Kumar’s top PhD candidates.
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