Swarming MAVs Form Insta-Network
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 9 of September , 2010 at 12:25 am
In March of last year, we posted about a project to mount WiFi and cellular routers on quadrotor UAVs to enable rapid deployment of networks in disaster areas. EPFL has been working on the same sort of thing, except utilizing swarms of micro air vehicles (MAVs) relying on intelligence algorithms derived from the behavior of army ants. Basically, it’s like LANDroids, except airborne.
SMAVNET (Swarming Micro Air Vehicle Network) consists of a whole bunch of small, cheap (or relatively cheap, more on that in a follow-up post) micro air vehicles. Each one carries an off-the-shelf USB wireless dongle, and by following simple rules to optimize their positions and scout new territory, the drones can spread out, locate a target, establish a robust aerial data network, and then make their way back to base for an automated landing when they’re finished. Sweet concept, right? Well, here’s the system in action using real MAVs:
As far as I know, these 10 MAVs constitute the largest outdoor aerial robotic swarm ever deployed. SMAVNET is primarily designed to facilitate communications in disaster areas. However, it’s hard to ignore the potential military applications, especially considering how similar SMAVNET is to the LANDroid project, which is sponsored by DARPA. There are obviously substantial upsides and downsides to flying network nodes versus ground network nodes, but it strikes me that a combination of the two would be ideal: SMAVNET provides fast response time, while LANDroids offer longer term endurance. That’s just a fantasy, of course, but it’s pretty cool to watch how swarm robotics has been evolving over the last few years, especially now that we’re starting to see real life practical applications for the technology.
[ SMAVNET ]
Thanks Sabine!
Comments (7)
Category: Research
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Comment by Michael_B
Made Thursday, 9 of September , 2010 at 1:59 am
Inspiring.
Comment by cynox
Made Thursday, 9 of September , 2010 at 11:07 am
realy nice, I like the view of the sky with the uav swarm
Now ” all you have to do ” is to make it solar, so you have a network as long as the sun shines :)
Comment by Jo
Made Thursday, 9 of September , 2010 at 10:33 pm
One thing that I think we can make it better than using the ant (even though I’m an ant guy) based algorithm here is that why don’t we just form the chain of UAV and sweep the field like a radar. Once, we found the target we can do whatever load balancing method you wanna use. That would require less UAVs too (in searching scheme).
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