Small robots that fly and cooperate

Small robots that fly and cooperate

1. These are related to UAVs

   • Disadvantages of UAVs, they are...
     • Heavy (weight of thousand of punds)
     • Not agile
     • Not autonomous
       • They´re operated by flight crews
       • Include multiple pilots
       • Need operators of sensors
       • Need mission coordinators

2. physical features

   • Light (They weigh a few punds)
   • They are around a meter
   • Retrofited with sensors and processors
   • Their size allows them to fly indoors

3. How it works

   • It has four rotors
     • Four rotors spinning at the same speed
       • The robot hovers
     • Increase of speed
       • Robot flies up and accelerates up
     • Rotor 4 spins faster and rotor 2 spins slower
       • The momentum makes the robot roll
     • Increase the speed of a pair of rotors
       • The robot yaws about the vertical axis
   • On-board processors looks at the motions and combines them
     • Figures out the right commands to send to the motors 600 hundred times a second

4. Inertia

   • Releated to R
   • governs angular motion

5. Angular acceleration = 1/R

   • The smaller he robot is, the quicker it turns

6. The robot was thrown up into the air

   • the on-board processors get feedback from accelerometers and gyros and calculates 600 times a second
     • The robot recovers and comes back to him

7. Aplications

   • First response
     • You can send them inside buildings like this to...
       • Look for intruders
       • look for biochemical leaks
   • Construction
     • The robots can...
       • carry beams, columns
       • assembling cubes like structures
         • Algorithm for autonomously build cubic structures
           • Tells the robot what part to pick-up, when and where to place it
   • Transportation
     • Robots can be used for transporting cargo
   • Search and rescue
     • Send robots to collapsed building
       • Assess the damage after natural disasters

8. Problem

   • Their size
   • Solution
     • Multiple robots to work together
       • How to coordinate lots of robots
         • Decentrilized control
           • It´s impossible to coordinate all the information centrally fast enough
         • Actions of robots based only on local information
           • Sense what their neighbors
         • Make the robost agnostic to who their neighbors are

9. How does an autonomous robot go frem point A to B?

   • The 12-dimensional space turns into a flat, four-dimension space (x,y,z, yaw)
     • The route is chosen
       • We come back to the 12-dimension space
         • execution
       • The robot knows to combine little bits ans pieces of trajectories to complete the tasks

10. No motion capture system (No lab)

    • Robot with laser rangefinder
      • Uses its sensors to build a map of the environment
        • The map consist of features
          • doorways, windows, people, furniture
        • Figures out its position with respect to the features
          • Estimates its position 100 times a second

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