"Nano Quad: Pre-programmed flying robots that fit into your palm could render UAVs redundant"

 

By Dr Vijay Kumar 
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have been featured in the popular press. Even though UAVs are unmanned, they are not autonomous. They are remotely piloted, often by a flight crew consisting of pilots, operators of sensors and mission coordinators. They are also quite large, weighing hundreds or thousands of pounds. 

Now, imagine really small flying robots, that are around a foot in scale, weighing around a pound, and are completely autonomous. Robots like these could fly low to the ground, in indoor environments, or through jungles and caverns. 

FLYING ROBOTS 
We have developed many such micro aerial robots. Some rely on commercially available platforms that we equip with our own sensors and processors and adapt to our applications. Our latest robot, the Nano
Quad, is now made by KMel Robotics, weighs a little over a tenth of a pound, consumes only around 15 watts of power and fits into the palm of your hands. 

The Nano Quad is a quadrotor, a helicopter with four rotors whose speeds are precisely controlled by microcontrollers 600 times per second to produce just the right lift, roll, pitch and yaw. Onboard sensors allow it to sense its attitude and respond with remarkable agility. In fact, it can perform a 360 degree flip in less than half a second with angular rates approach 2000 degrees per second. 

Robots like this have many exciting applications. You can send them inside buildings in response to emergencies. They can be used for construction operations, for carrying beams or columns and assembling them into structures. They can be sent into buildings after natural disasters to assess damage or into reactor buildings to map radiation levels after accidents. 

However, small robots like this are constrained by their ability to carry payloads, whether it be cargo for transportation or sensors for mapping. One way to overcome this limitation is by giving robots the intelligence that allows them to cooperate in such tasks. 

We have also developed the mathematical framework and the algorithms that allow these robots to reason about their environment and their neighbours and take actions that ensure cooperation without having a centralised coordinator that explicitly determines each action. 

If you combine the agility of individual robots with the smarts that enable cooperation, you can develop large groups or swarms of flying robots. Our group's basic research in our laboratory has led to demonstrations of a group of 20 robots flying precisely in formation within inches of each other, robots that can coordinate to carry objects that are several times heavier than the capacity of individual robots, and robots that can remotely map the interior of buildings. 

THE 'E' IN TED 

I had the opportunity to present the work at a TED conference in Long Beach last week. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design and brings together some of the smartest people in the world. Everyone is an expert, but in a completely different field. It is quite challenging to explain the complex mathematics, the sophisticated algorithms and the system architecture that guarantees precision performance without talking down to an audience like this. 

While academics like me have extensive experience in talking to others about technology, we don't really think about the E in TED. My group pulled together an amazing demonstration in which a group of autonomous flying robots equipped with special pads were able to play guitars, drums and keyboards.Go to our website to view the remarkable rendition of the James Bond theme song. 

(The author, a graduate of IIT Kanpur, is UPS Foundation Professor, School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, University of Pennsylvania)