Flying Rescue Drones Will Claw Like Eagles and Swarm Like Bees

Nature - inspired engineering is n’t new — but engineers are still finding new ways to take cue from biology . We got the beastly lowdown at day 3 of theRoboUniverseconference in New York this aurora .

Vijay Kumar , who ’s recently been name Dean of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania , delivered a tonic about the future of wing ‘ bot . He and his colleagues count to the animal realm for conception mind . Here ’s what they ’re come up with :

Eagle-like grasping

The lofty symbolization of American freedom sure do it how to put an airborne death grip on its quarry , and researchers at Penn want flying automaton to do the same affair with grabbable objects . So the team outfitted a flying robot with some claws and snatched up a pathetic Philly cheesesteak in the research lab at three meters per minute . This can help rescue drone tear crucial items from rubble or from risky conditions . The team is also working with robots that can deport lowly loads , like eagles can : they ’ve receive robot with a tiny packet dangling from a connected string , and that can fly through Hawaiian dancing hoops with the cargo entire .

Bee-like swarming

“ Size does matter — smaller is honorable , ” Kumar say . One thing that many roboticists are concerned in nowadays is the notion of the “ artificial drove , ” in which many drones are remove at once . So Penn turned to bees : They ’re puny , travel en masse shot , and do n’t care if they bump into each other . ( “ One affair engineer obsess about is collision avoidance — but bee do n’t care because they ’re humble and can recover , ” Kumar says . ) They developed “ Pico , ” a four - inch farsighted , .04 - pound minibot that zoom at 20 feet per s and is encased in something of a protective cage that countenance for care - free collisions .

Ant-like coordinating

ant are great at self - devise . And researchers require golem that can divvy themselves up into cooperative teams . So the “ leader - follower ” networks that Penn is sour with involve little cloud of flyspeck flight robots ( say , four or five in a mathematical group ) that are programmed to vanish in establishment . Kumar says the “ robots are agnostic to the identicalness of their neighbors — they do n’t even acknowledge the total issue in the squad . ” So they adapt when novel fellow member are added , increasing the circle and continuing the formation . Kumar likens it to strangers in a elbow room being call for to team up up to move a table .

These feature , specially the artificial swarming , could help folk music dispatch big groups of first answerer automaton in a disaster . Within instant , big squad of drones with down facing camera can flock to the conniption to be humans ’ eye and ears before the humans even arrive .

watch out the video below to see one type of these bio - inspired ‘ bots in action :