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 ]

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Category: Research

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