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Aerial robots swarm the stage at TED [video]
- MCompeau 15y agoAfter seeing these mind-blowing quadracopter videos from UPenn popping up online all over the place for the past couple years, its great to finally see a culminating talk about the work being done there. Congrats guys!
- iradik 15y agoCan they deliver me a burrito?
- tambourine_man 15y agoA bit scary but very cool.
- dLuna 15y agoAm I the only one who wants to mount a nerf gun on a squad of these and then play war in the back yard?
- sologoub 15y agoI'm sure pentagon types are thinking just that... minus the nerf part. :) The first thing I thought of how many lives could be saved with scouting buildings.
- nwatson 15y agoThe second thing I thought of was how cross-border and urban illegal drug distribution is gonna be made much easier with this. I won't be part of it, but, just sayin'.
- javert 15y agoMaybe I missed it, but contra the title, I did not see any robots flying in the TED venue. Since I've seen most of these other vids (but not that), that's what I was looking for :(
- falcolas 15y agoThe quadroter in the gentleman's hand landed there at the start of the talk, but otherwise it was all in the videos.
- robotresearcher 15y agoOn of the students is carrying an RC remote when he comes on stage at the end. It would be very hard to fly these little guys autonomously at TED, since they use the off-board Vicon multi-camera IR motion-tracking system in their control loop. That's a big, expensive installation in the lab. Kumar's group is very well respected in the field. They've had several years of strong innovation. Vijay is really good at what he does, and a nice guy.
- falcolas 15y agoThey were discussing quadroters that don't use the motion tracking system as well - ones that use the onboard kinect to do the spatial mapping.
- jjwiseman 15y agoIt might have been too much effort to set up the multi-camera Vicon motion capture system at TED, calibrate it, etc. And unless they put them inside an aviary, which would also obscure the drones, I'd be a little worried about losing control of a machine with several exposed spinning blades in an auditorium full of people.
- cdibona 15y agoThey've set up exactly those before at Ted, but no, they didn't do so this year.
- TeMPOraL 15y agoThe other talk (not yet on-line) featured a remote-controlled hummingbird drone flying around the TED stage. See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgbdKNsw3Kc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgbdKNsw3Kc
- modeless 15y agoThe Kinect-mapping quadrotor was the most interesting demo; that could be useful today. Imagine letting loose a swarm of quadrotors in a large building and having a complete map and textured 3D model of the interior and exterior within just a few hours.
- tobias3 15y agoThe Kinect has a very limited range, is not accurate and works only in certain lightning condition. That's why they added a laser scanner. Those are over $1000. Then in order to build the map via SLAM in real time you need a really powerfull PC/Laptop. Even a netbook is not going to do it, at least for the SLAM in ROS(ros.org). Then it looks like they added a all angles are 90° assumtion, because normally the map does not look that nice because little errors accumulate. So it will take a while till we see something like that outside universities.
- jjwiseman 15y agoLaser scanners have become a bit cheaper (and smaller) in the past few years (Thanks, DARPA Grand Challenge & Urban Challenge). Neato Robotics has developed a planar scanner that costs $30 to build--It's on their robot vacuum. See "A low-cost laser distance sensor", http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4543666&tag=1 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4543666...
- wavephorm 15y agoHey quit being a letdown, this really amazing stuff. You should reword it more like: "The video is showing amazing new thingamabobs that will get less expensive over the next few years, and pretty soon you will all be able to use robots like this in your everyday life".
- modeless 15y agoKinect-like sensors are going to improve very quickly (http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/29/2834088/samsung-camera-sensor-captures-image-depth-information http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/29/2834088/samsung-camera-sen...), as are SLAM algorithms using Kinect-like data. High cost isn't necessarily a problem for this application, as one team of copters could map many facilities. Computing power can be mostly centralized at a base station that can be as beefy as you want. Certainly a commercial product is years rather than months away, but I think even this limited demo could already be useful for e.g. mapping the nuclear reactors at Fukushima.
- aqme28 15y agoI can't help but think that that swarm-building-a-cube algorithm could be vastly improved. Those robots are doing a lot of waiting around.
- wittgenstein 15y agoAmazing work from the Penn GRASP lab! This is ground breaking!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- notatalker 15y agoThat was weird. I read, "Aerial robots swarm the stage at TED". I thought how rad of a demo that would be. Then I saw "[video]". And got excited to see video of a TED talk with robots swarming the stage. The canned video they had was riggin' rad, but I was disappointed. Damn you, Ken Fisher!
- fmstephe 15y agoThis is just the thing I love to see on Hacker News. Every time you see this I remember why I spend all those hours hacking and learning. Really lights a fire under your ass.
- learc83 15y agoOne of the things I think of when I see autonomous quadrotors is a localized missile defense shield. A swarm of disposable quadrotors surrounding a ship, set on a rotating recharge schedule, that intercept missiles and detonate a small explosive payload.
- 3lit3H4ck3r 15y agoUnfortunately, I agree. From the first time I saw this technology the top application that jumped off the page to me was of a military nature. Perhaps a day will come when this may not be so. Until that day comes, tech like this, I believe, will save lives; on and off the battlefield.
- gnosis 15y agoSave lives, or cost lives (or both), depending on who's in charge and what their aims are.
- 3lit3H4ck3r 15y agoThe scariest part of inventing/innovation; the realization that what one creates may fall into the hands of those with aims that are less than noble...
- bhickey 15y agoHow would this have any advantage over a defensive system like Phalanx?
- learc83 15y agoIt would be much harder to overwhelm with multiple missiles. You have to place Phalanx systems all around the ship in order to provide 360 degree protection. However, an enemy could concentrate multiple missiles on a space covered by only 1 Phalanx. If radar detects multiple missiles inbound, more drones could be easily be routed to the appropriate area to intercept. To overwhelm the defense you'd have to fire more missiles than the ship has drones (and since drones could be made much more cheaply than supersonic missiles, that would be fairly hard to do).
- joshu 15y agoBlah, I was at TED and missed this. Dangit.
- iwwr 15y agoCan we get the designs of these robots somewhere?