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Throwing and catching an inverted pendulum with quadrocopters
- jawns 14y agoI keep trying to think of practical implications for this technology, but every time I do, I just end up daydreaming about robot circuses.
- trafficlight 14y agoThat's practical enough for me.
- gojomo 14y agoI'd like to see an aerial battle-bots event. Imagine a giant transparent cube or orb 'stadium', with entry points for opposing fleets. There might be capture-the-flag or last-man-standing victory conditions, and a variety of units, perhaps including dirigibles.
- stcredzero 14y ago> There might be capture-the-flag How about "Transport the flag?" Or how about a bunch of flags? The other team is allowed to try and disrupt your transportation as well.
- baddox 14y agoCapture the flag generally implies "transport the flag."
- stcredzero 14y agoI was going for something like the economy in StarCraft. You have a stream of poles shot into the arena from catapults, and scoring is based on how many get transported back to each team's goal. (Minus the exponential increase, though.)
- saraid216 14y agoI can't read this and not think Quidditch-minus-Snitch.
- kenny_r 14y agoQuadditch! Man, forget the Robocup (http://www.robocup.org/ http://www.robocup.org/), I would watch the hell out of a Quadditch tournament.
- stcredzero 14y agoYou could use a little copter as the snitch.
- saraid216 14y agoIn the eternal words of HPMOR!Harry, "And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else's work moot. It's like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King's idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn't understand the rules?"
- saraid216 14y agoOn the other hand, "keeping your eyes moving in a pattern" sounds like a thing that would be interesting for computer vision.
- stcredzero 14y agoI entirely agree that the seeker less variant is a more interesting participant sport. The seeker variant will probably be requested since it is canon, at least at first.
- alwaysdoit 14y agoI want them to throw some sort a water-balloon like device at each other and have them try to gently catch it. Except this balloon explodes with fire instead of water if it can't catch it softly.
- joelthelion 14y agoOr "build the biggest tower"?
- gojomo 14y agoBuild and defend!
- devindotcom 14y agoSomething that popped into my head is a drone tossing a grenade through a window. The military would go nuts over this.
- samstave 14y agoIt's sad that research like this is first thought to be most of value killing people.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoThey are going nuts over this. Just look at DARPA drone research, all the manufacturing contracts, the increased battlefield use, the call for more pilots to be trained...
- kunle 14y agoThey are already doing this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281403/U-S-Air-Force-developing-terrifying-swarms-tiny-unmanned-drones-hover-crawl-kill-targets.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281403/U-S-Air-Forc...
- kruken 14y agoLots of scary things are possible as the hardware gets smaller/lighter/stronger and the control algorithms get more sophisticated. Grenade lobbing is quite pedestrian compared to "precision targeting" in the video here: http://bit.ly/W6DnuO http://bit.ly/W6DnuO
- DGrutt 14y agoWaiter, another beer please.
- cadalac 14y agoPlease tilt head upward and open mouth.
- theorique 14y agoI heard that you can weaponize unmanned aerial vehicles ...
- rcfox 14y agoBalancing an inverted pendulum is one of the classic "hard" problems in control theory. (At least, in undergrad.) Not only has he solved that on a flying platform, but he's going to the next levels. Tossing sticks around between flying robots isn't inherently useful, but it means they have a foundation for further, more complex work.
- hogu 14y agowell you can do a single inverted pendulum pretty easily with a PID controller, it's the double inverted pendulum that is hard. But anything on a quadrocopter is really hard.
- rcfox 14y agoOh, you're right. I was thinking of the double inverted pendulum.
- bri3d 14y agoA free-flying small quadcopter is incredibly difficult as on-board sensors generally consist of noisy, drift-prone MEMS gyros and accelerometers, small and interference-sensitive magnetometers, bad civilian GPS, and barometers that are prone to environmental fluctuation. In addition, a free-flying quadcopter requires either complete autonomy or an RF link with some range or reliability, which generally requires a good amount of power. But these aren't free-flying quadcopters; the researchers used a very high-end motion capture rig and a PC in close proximity, making everything a lot less difficult - with motion capture, positional accuracy is quite easy and sensor noise is easy to correct for, and with enough money someone else has already solved the latency issues in motion-capture for you. I certainly agree this video is impressive but I also believe lab-only motion capture-based demos skew the hobbyist and public vision of what small quadcopters can do.
- bigiain 14y agoDid you see the show from Cannes last year? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseTX_rW3uM&t=50 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseTX_rW3uM&t=50 I don't know how much of that was motion-capture, it seems like a quite difficult environment to have done that...
- Jplenbrook 14y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU Aiming bullets, not poles.
- huherto 14y agolol. I can only come up with gaming applications. flying robots that build stuff(jenga?), air battles. I recently got a vacuum roomba and I am very entertained just on by watching it work. But I am a geek, probably not everybody is like that.
- egypturnash 14y agoMy first thought was "I want to see these juggle three poles". Nothing wrong with robot circuses.
- pseut 14y agoConstruction comes to mind immediately, but yeah, I'm a sucker for those videos.
- lazyjones 14y agoYou could catch someone falling off a building or airplane with a (suitably large and fast) quadrocopter, I suppose.
- primitur 14y agoBuilding emergency shelters as quickly as possible? Repairing wind-blown greenhouses in remote places as quickly as possible? Building a water-pipe as quickly as possible? Elevator-to-the-stars building mechanic?
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThat is insanely cool. Quit your job and play with quadrocopters cool. I'm surprised we've not seen larger versions of this platform for civilian use.
- jws 14y agoGive it time: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1671680066/incredible-hlq-heavy-lift-quadcopter http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1671680066/incredible-hl... That's a student project that needed funding. • 50lb payload • Two 12.5HP engines • Distributing information (their most lucrative reward was the $250 "get a copy of all the information and data" at 10 copies.) Definitely deadly. I would not be near it in operation.
- sliverstorm 14y agoThe system uses an external observer and external computer to track the bots and make decisions. Implementing this in a civilian setting would be much more difficult than simply making the bots larger.
- Ao7bei3s 14y agoThey have been in civilian (private/commercial) use for a few years (since 2008 or so). Mostly for taking pictures from above -- they are relatively well-suited for that. (And for fun flying of course) For transporting big things: it's more efficient to have larger rotors than to have multiple rotors. For transporting really big things: see above, and helicopters have been around for a long long time; "we" (not me) have decades of experience with helicopters; you probably really want something that is safe and reliable. You can't just scale up your model. As for quadrocopter piloting: right now, all pilots crash. Repeatedly. Luckily, repairs are cheap (unless you happen to carry an expensive camera). For a full-size aircraft, crashing is probably not an option, so add lots of dev/testing time for safety features and pilot training. BTW (somewhat unrelated): One huge problem with (smaller) quadrocopters is the many people that start new copter projects and get nowhere instead of contributing to one of the existing major projects or reusing its soft/hardware. Some of these projects are already way beyond what a single person or even a small team can achieve in a few years work.
- zacharydanger 14y agoI couldn't figure out how the quadrocopters were coordinated. Turns out it's a high-speed motion capture. More here: http://www.flyingmachinearena.org/ http://www.flyingmachinearena.org/
- ynniv 14y agoTo first order, this is always true. It should also be noted that computation happens on a desktop computer.
- sliverstorm 14y agoFor quadrotors at least. Most of the projects I've seen coming out of Boston Dynamics are, as best I can tell, entirely self-contained. (This is part of why BD impresses me so much)
- nightski 14y agoI may not be fully up to date but I have never seen a BD video with cooperating robots.
- ynniv 14y agoYes, but none of them are (permanently) aerial and some of them use internal combustion for power. Computation requires weight and energy, and computer vision requires lots of computation.
- smackfu 14y agoAren't most of their videos using a tether though? Which is pretty much the same "only works in the lab" issue.
- michaelt 14y agoProjects using quadrotors to do things like fly cooperatively and do acrobatics [1,2] will often use high speed motion capture systems with multiple fixed cameras. This decouples the problem of perceiving the environment from the problem of responding to the environment. More broadly in robotics there are plenty of people working on ground-based robots that don't rely on multiple fixed high speed cameras - self-driving cars [3] would be one example. There are also people working on cooperative ground based robots that don't rely on multiple fixed high speed cameras - for example, the RoboCupSoccer Middle-Size League [4]. There are also people working on quadrotors that don't cooperate/do acrobatics and who don't rely on fixed vision systems - for example people working on autonomous quadrotor mapping [5] and using IMUs and on-robot vision [6]. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuSqwb13iw0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuSqwb13iw0 [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoiJeIb0wBA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoiJeIb0wBA [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXSGTkI390w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXSGTkI390w [5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoMrPKCpWXw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoMrPKCpWXw [6] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKGZcTFambE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKGZcTFambE
- davidradcliffe 14y agoWow.
- hemancuso 14y agoLooking forward to when Amazon's warehouses are automated with quadrocopters.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoKiva Systems already makes a warehouse robot. I didn't know if Amazon used them or not, so I did some quick Googling and it turns out Amazon bought the company! http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/amazon-com-buys-kiva-systems-for-775-million/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/amazon-com-buys-kiva-...
- jayzee 14y agoand it was the same guy Raff D'Andrea who started that company
- Wingman4l7 14y agoHah, good catch! Small world =)
- cfos 14y agointerestingly, Rafaello d'Andrea the leader of this drone research in the flying machine arena in Zürich is also one of the co-founders of KIVA systems. other research groups (e.g. http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/ http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/) are working on bringing this technology out of the motion capture system by mounting cameras on the drones and use image processing algorithms to estimate the drones trajectory.
- zkidd 14y agoFunny how we first think about games and circuses, but really I think what we're responding to is that these quadrocopters are almost childlike. Building a machine that inspires you to remember how you, yourself, played as a child is incredible. I guess all I'm saying is that I see these things and they are lifelike in that their demonstrable skills, I know, can/will lead to so many other advanced actions. . . Just like a kid learning to hit a tee-ball.
- tel 14y agoCould anyone put together a rough curriculum for the control theory needed to understand something like this? It's absolutely fantastic.
- femto 14y agoRead any "control theory"[1] text, frequently used in undergraduate engineering courses. I hesitate to recommend the text from my undergraduate years, as it wasn't very good, and is probably dated by now. The inverted pendulum [2] is a canonical test in control engineering, frequently used to test feedback control algorithms. Consequently, it should be treated in most texts. A separate problem is the modelling and control of the quadcopter. I say separate, since the maths behind throwing an inverted pendulum should be similar, whether it is being thrown by quadcopters or industrial robots. The real (and more complex) story here is the quadcopter control algorithms. Using an inverted pendulum is a sexy way to show off the quadcopted control algorithms, compared to a dry graph of an error function. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pendulum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pendulum
- catilac 14y agoI feel like a link has popped up on HN, but I can't find it. Where can I buy a small quadrocopter which I can program, and build my own system with?
- WA 14y agoI think you mean this one, right? http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/preorder-crazyflie-nano-quadcopter-kit-10dof-with-crazyradio-bccfk02a-p-1365.html?cPath=170_172 http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/preorder-crazyflie-nano-qua...
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- IgorPartola 14y agoYour comment made me giggle. I've never seen anything like what's in this video. Moreover, I haven't even thought of this as being an area of research. Your comment makes it sound like you've been sitting there waiting for the state of the art to advance to the point where you could have your own robotic jugglers. +1 to you for being a very specific visionary!
- pointernil 14y ago"The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer", Neal Stephenson just saying ;) ...
- pbhjpbhj 14y agoWhy are you just saying that. Presumably that's a book suggestion, why is it pertinent?
- Simucal 14y ago"...then Bud made himself scarce, because the monitors - almond-sized aerostats with eyes, ears, and radios - had probably picked up the sound of the explosion and begun converging on the attack. He saw one hiss by him as he rounded the corner, trailing a short whip antenna that caught the light like a hairline crack in the atmosphere. Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays. Nanotech materials were stronger. Computers were infinitesimal. Power supplies were much more potent...a device built with several thrusters pointed along different axes could remain in one position or indeed navigate through space." - The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson (1995)
- jfoster 14y agoTED talk that preceded this, featuring 3 quadcopters with a net and ball: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4IJXAVXgIo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4IJXAVXgIo
- evo_9 14y agoCongratulations - machines are one step closer to destroying the human race.
- jeremyarussell 14y agoAnd only 999,999 more steps to go.
- mauricio-OH 14y ago0.65s of pure robotics awesomness...
- tunesmith 14y agoSo, just get two larger quadrocopters and you could walk across a gorge. Each one would just catch each of your steps.
- sodiumphosphate 14y agoAnd possibly remove your foot.
- flavorcountry 14y agoI feel like it'd be insanely easier to, you know, ride one quadrocopter. Across the gorge.
- tunesmith 14y agoBut, but.... um...
- Eliezer 14y agoSince this uses an explicit model of the world, Rodney-Brooks-style robotics is now officially dead.
- mikekij 14y agoHoly crap, that's amazing. I'm excited when I can get MySQL started on my development machine. Those are some smart dudes ( and / or ladies).
- rmollo 14y ago>dudes and ladies You mean men and women. Although I didn't see any women in the video. (Better include them just in case, so my friends don't think I'm a sexist pig!)
- deadwait 14y agohow did they get arnold for the commentary?
- borplk 14y agoImagine what kind of quadrocopters DARPA and similar agencies have these days.
- sgoody 14y agoBatteries not included.
- speedyrev 14y agoAll fun and games until they fly in your window at night and kill you in your sleep.
- jordan_clark 14y agoMathematics in motion is a beautiful thing.