Chen, a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, has developed insect-sized drones with unprecedented dexterity and resilience. The aerial robots are powered by a new class of soft actuator, which allows them to withstand the physical travails of real-world flight. Chen hopes the robots could one day aid humans by pollinating crops or performing machinery inspections in cramped spaces.
Tiny Drones
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Each FlyCroTug drone has a specialized attachment at the end of a long cable that can be paid out and then pulled back in through a winch. That means the drones can attach one end of their cable to an object, fly off, land, and anchor themselves before hauling the heavy load toward them. What might normally be one small step at a time for wasps becomes one giant flying leap at a time for the drones, Estrada explained.
Having tiny drones that can explore cramped spaces and still exert large forces upon their surroundings opens many new possibilities for search-and-rescue applications in either civilian or military scenarios. For example, Estrada suggested that such drones could be a portable tool for first responders or military personnel to deploy sensors or transport medical supplies to a person stuck in a remote location.
A second door-opening scenario required teamwork between two FlyCroTug drones. The first drone grabbed the door handle with a special grappling attachment and then anchored itself to the smooth glass door. The second drone slipped a hook under the door and then latched onto the nearby carpet to pull the door open, once the handle had been turned.
As impressive as this all sounds, the FlyCroTug drones still face serious limitations. Their current battery life is sufficient for just five minutes of flight time, which severely limits what they can do. Complex and unknown environments would also require possibly many versions of the drones with different attachments and anchor mechanisms for various surfaces. But the latter may not be a problem, if such flying robots could be made cheaply and be deployed as swarms of disposable drones.
Researchers have not yet developed either sensing capabilities or artificial intelligence capabilities for such drones to operate even semi-independently, let alone in fully autonomous mode without human control. But Estrada believes that a teleoperation approach makes the most sense for near-future deployments of such technology.
Nano drones, the advanced systems that pack a lot of functionality into a tiny form factor, are becoming a major military tool. FLIR announced last month that they have won an additional $20.6 million contract for their Black Hornet 3 Personal Reconnaissance Systems (PRS).
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Single aerial drones help people in many ways, such as assisting in search and rescue missions. Drone swarms can be similarly handy, accomplishing tasks including surveying endangered wildlife in harsh and remote environments. But there are some environments where flying robotic teams still struggle to go. For example, crowded airspaces like thick woods can challenge swarms trying to plan a flight path.
Now, a flight path planning method published in the May 4 issue of Science Robotics offers a new way for drone swarms to successfully fly in crowded, unfamiliar airspaces. When tested, the system helped 10 small autonomous flying drones efficiently pick the best way to fly through a cluttered bamboo forest. Using the new approach, the palm-sized drones also maintained formation, avoided collisions, and tracked a human in unfamiliar environments.
With these factors in mind, Zhou and his colleagues designed a trajectory planning method that processed data from embedded computers on 10 micro-drones to help those drones swarm in four unfamiliar environments.
For the first test, the robotic swarm used the planning system to fly through dense bamboo forest. The drones adjusted their trajectories in response to obstacles like fallen bamboo, skillfully passing through narrow openings between stalks roughly less than 30 centimeters wide. This test showed how that system incorporated trajectory optimality and miniature size.
Next, the researchers evaluated the drone swarm's ability to stay in formation, demonstrating extensibility by assigning the swarm a moving shape while navigating an unknown airspace. During this test, the drones kept their overall formation while flying through standing bushes, trees, and two human-made pillars.
Following the formation test, the robotic swarm zoomed through an aerial traffic scenario, where each drone's flight path was pre-designed to intersect with others. The drones had to adapt in the moment to avoid collisions. Zhou, Gao, and their colleagues had the swarm track and film a single person, testing the system's economical computing and extensibility.
When patients are treated with radiotherapy and/or drugs delivered via injections, the treatment can often harm healthy cells and tissue, in addition to cancer cells. Our tiny drones will enable highly targeted tumor cell death, with minimal damage to healthy tissue. In addition, the trained white blood cells will have the potential to kill off any cancer that may arise or come back in the future.
They want to find the best solution to a deadly problem soldiers faced in Afghanistan, and one that’s likely to come up in other locations where urban canyons and forest canopies play the role of mountains. Soldiers in Afghanistan would get pinned down in a valley with limited knowledge of what might lie over the next ridge and with only a tenuous communications link to commanders. By pulling a cyclocopter or a flapping drone from a rucksack and letting it fly from the palm of his or her hand, a soldier of the future would gain a bird’s eye view with the aid of a 1- or 2-gram camera or the ability to relay communications via a network of other drones.
For aircraft technologists, questions abound, from which drone concept would work best in which circumstances to how cyclocopters and flapping drones would perform compared to conventional quadcopters and miniature helicopters, especially when faced with the great bane of all micro air vehicles: wind gusts.
Testing of the flapping and cyclocopter designs will culminate in August 2017, likely at the Army Research Laboratory in Maryland with the micro drones demonstrating hovering, flying forward and performing basic maneuvers. The researchers are also testing how fast the drones can fly, how quickly they can maneuver and how they fly when hit by simulated wind gusts from a fan, Benedict says.
“We’re interested in getting down in the urban canyon; we’re interested in moving under the canopy; the sorts of places where soldiers operate. In those spaces, you’ve got gusts and wind disturbances that are on length scales that are the size of the vehicles,” he says, plus the tiny aircraft have to adjust to the change in aerodynamic forces that occur close to the ground.“Also, there’s an equivalent wall effect: If you get too close to a tree, it will pull you in. So you need an aircraft that’s intrinsically agile, and you’re not going to do much steady flight at these small scales.”
Flapping-wing drones are worth studying because of their agility and wind gust tolerance, though not for efficiency, Benedict says. The flapping-wing drone controls its flight path and its hover like a hummingbird would: by changing the length of one wing’s stroke relative to the other wing to control roll, by tilting forward both planes of flapping to change pitch, and by tilting one wing’s plane forward and the other plane back to change yaw.
One challenge with both cyclocopters and flapping-wing aircraft is their inherent instability. The blades on a cyclorotor are always changing angles, so the aerodynamics are unsteady and changing over time. A 1.3-gram autopilot, designed at the University of Maryland by Vikram Hrishikeshavan and Inderjit Chopra, controls both the 29-gram cyclocopter and the 62-gram robotic hummingbird with a microprocessor connected to a triaxial gyroscope and tri-axial accelerometer. With both drones the microprocessor takes the raw data from the gyro and accelerometer and directs the aircrafts’ controllers — motors and servos — to automatically stabilize them. The autopilot also allows the drones to send and receive data wirelessly, and for the human pilot to provide higher-level commands, on top of the automatic stabilization. But without the stabilization, a human pilot won’t be able to fly these vehicles, Benedict says.
The US military apparently never tires of thinking up capability gaps, and that means we may soon see fleets of small drones dropping out of bombers, then later being yanked out of the sky by cargo planes. Cartoonish as it may sound---as is the case with so many deadly-serious but still far-out military concepts---it makes a lot of sense. And Darpa, the Pentagon's weapon of choice for making crazy things happen, just chose four companies to push the idea forward. 2ff7e9595c
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