The research group of the Institute for Dynamics Systems and Control, led by Raffaello D’Andrea at the ETH of Zurich, in collaboration with a team of architects led by Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, presented an installation in which a swarm of quadcopters autonomously pick up sequentially 1500 foam bricks (500 gr each) and position them at the right place to build a 6-meter tall tower with a sophisticated shape.
The Grasp Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania developed a quadcopter with a robotic arm, that is able to “grasp”, like an eagle does.
The grasping action was successfully tested to a speed up to 3 m/s (7,2 Km/h).
ArchAerial, a young company that specializes in the use of multirotors for mapping purposes, with a focus on archeological research and excavation sites, has published an interesting video on the possible uses of quadcopters in a restaurant environment , in collaboration with Swift’s Attic, a nice restaurant apparently open to innovation and new technologies, located in Austin Texas.
In the video, the little custom made multicopters from ArchAerial are shown performing a variety of tasks such as serving at the table:
slicing vegetables:
Continue reading Kitchen Drones in action – Multirotors support in running a restaurant
MUWA: Multi-Field Universal Wheel for Air-Land Vehicle with Quad Variable-Pitch Propellers. A complicated name for a new prototype quadcopter that can perform a number of functions usually not associated with multirotors, such as rolling and floating.
Here’s the rolling drone:
This is not for fun. It is a research project developed in a robotics lab in Tokyo University and has a number of very serious potential applications that are briefly shown in the video that we post below. Those include capturing 3D images of environments, for example closed spaces, maybe difficult to reach otherwise.
The device can of course perform also perform as a regular quadcopter. It flies nicely.
Here’s the video:
Source and further readings:
Markus Fischer and his team developed smartbird, a robot that flies like a seagull.
As for the dragonfly, the world of flying animals inspires engineers for the building of human made flying machines. Enjoy the video:
Prof. Raffaello D’andrea, about whom we already made another post on athletic flying machines, talks at Zurich Minds about “Feedback Control and the Coming Machine Revolution”.
Here’s the video:
Amazing presentation by Raffaello D’Andrea, Professor of Dynamics Systems and Control at the Zurich ETH. Prof. D’andrea demonstrates the amazing skills that can be conferred to quadcopters by developing and applying the correct mathematical algorithms.
Here’s the video:
Raffaello D’andrea interviewed by Rolf Dobelli, talks about some of his ongoing projects:
Call your drone by phone wherever you are with the SkyCall app and then let him guide you to destination.
Skycall is a project developed in the Senseable City Lab of the MIT.
Read the story and watch the video:
Prof. Adrian Lauf from Louisville University, specialist in embedded systems, talks about drones and potential applications – Link
Found this video that features a long interview to Prof. Alan Frazier on the subject of drone usage in law enforcement, in which he also answers questions from the public.
Prof. Frazier has a very particular curriculum, as he is both a Professor at the North Dakota University, Department of Aviation and Deputy Sheriff in the Grand Forks County Sheriff’s Department (link). This puts him in a strong position to deeply understand the technical and legal background of quadcopters, multirotors and more in general UAV usage, and to apply this knowledge in the field, as a law enforcement officer. For these reasons it is of particular interest to hear his views on the subject of UAV and law enforcement. Here’s the video:
For some quick examples of how drones were used recently by Prof. Frazier in the field, see this article