January 16, 2011

Autonomous Quadrotor construction robots

Okay, this is full of whoa:


More amazing video here.

Via BotJunkie:
Back in July, we wrote about how UPenn’s GRASP Lab had taught their quadrotors to work together to grasp and move things. The next step, it seems, is teaching the quadrotors to work together to grasp and move things and actually build buildings. The video above shows a team of quadrotors cooperating to construct the framework of a (rather small) building. The building’s structure is held together with magnets, and the quadrotors are able to verify that the alignment is correct by attempting to wiggle the structural components around, which is pretty cool.

It’s fun to speculate about how this technology might grow out of the lab into the real world… To build actual buldings, you’d either need much bigger quadrotors (which is possible), lots of small quadrotors cooperating in big pieces (also possible), or buildings built out of much smaller components (which might be the way to go). The quadrotors probably wouldn’t be able to do all the work, but they have the potential to make construction projects significantly more efficient.

2 comments:

FutureNerd said...

Okay, this is how everything should be built from now on. Except, watching the time lapse parts with the buzzing sound, I kept thinking they should be making things with hexagonal cells rather than cubic cells.

Valkyrie Ice said...

I wrote about the use of these things as cheap remote telepresence units on H+ mag a few months ago, specifically pointing out how useful they could be for building, as well as police use, fire/rescue, VR telepresence, and many other things.

http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/fly-your-pov-around-your-own-personal-quadcopter

It's always nice to see progress occurring towards something you predict, no?