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Quadrotors Cooperate To Lift Heavy Objects

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 12 of July , 2010 at 3:04 am

We’ve posted a lot around here about how swarm robotics is potentially really, really awesome, but besides kidnapping children we haven’t seen that many relevant examples of practical swarm robotics. The above video, from the GRASP Lab at UPenn, shows a group of autonomous quadrotors (these bad boys) teaming up to lift heavy and off-balance loads.

Each quadrotor weighs 500 grams and can deliver some 1250 grams of thrust, making their individual payload capacity somewhere around half a kilogram. This means that a couple together could lift a kilogram, and you can do the math on from there, but there are lots of reasons why you might want a bunch of extra robots cooperating on the lift, which gets back to why swarm robotics has so much potential in the first place. For example, having extra bots protects against mechanical failure of an individual bot. It also protects against complications like wind. Or maybe whatever you’re lifting has a long distance to go or needs to be in the air for a while, and the bots can switch off to go recharge themselves.

It’s interesting to compare these cooperative quadrotors with that distributed flight array from ETH Zurich that we wrote about last month. It’s a different approach, certainly, but the premise is similar, and it’ll be lots of fun to see how each of these projects evolves.

[ GRASP ]

Comments (4)

Category: Research

4 Comments

Comment by David Barton

Made Tuesday, 24 of August , 2010 at 11:48 am

Yes! Fantastic writing, keep up the amazing job.

Comment by Chad Cledgett

Made Thursday, 18 of November , 2010 at 3:34 am

Hey guys, amazing work! As is suggested on this page, though, is it possible to have them lift something, and as their individual batteries die, switch out to recharge, with a fresh bot taking its place? Would require them to communicate with each other. Also, is it possible to lift something with an uneven weight distribution?

Comment by Dave Mange

Made Thursday, 16 of December , 2010 at 4:50 pm

I know that many robots are useful but most of the ones on the site seem to be experimental?

Comment by Richard Roberts

Made Tuesday, 3 of May , 2011 at 1:43 pm

Very informative article. Really thank you! Much obliged.

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