Swarms of drones

[Airicist]

Forum Swarm (https://pr.ai/forumdisplay.php?112)

[Airicist]

Article "The Navy is Preparing To Launch Swarm Bots Out of Cannons (https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/04/navy-preparing-launch-swarm-bots-out-cannons/110167)"

by Patrick Tucker
April 14, 2015

[Airicist]

https://youtu.be/OEyq67Q8kIs

Fifty drones controlled at once in record-breaking swarm

Published on Sep 15, 2015


A team at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has succeeded in launching 50 drones that were all piloted by a single person
Full story:
"Watch 50 drones controlled at once in a record-breaking swarm (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28173-watch-50-drones-controlled-at-once-in-a-record-breaking-swarm)"

by David Hambling
September 15, 2015

[Airicist]

https://youtu.be/QHMHSiqx5JA

Aerial Robot Swarms - Professor Vijay Kumar, University of Pennsylvania

Published on Jan 14, 2014


The Stanford S. and Beverly P. Penner Distinguished Lectures Present

Aerial Robot Swarms

Vijay Kumar
UPS Foundation Professor
School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
University of Pennsylvania

Monday, January 13, 2014
4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.
CMRR Auditorium, UCSD

http://mae.ucsd.edu/node/92

ABSTRACT
Autonomous micro aerial robots can operate in three-dimensional, indoor and outdoor environments, with applications to search and rescue, first response and precision farming. I will provide an overview of our work, and describe the challenges in developing small, agile robots and our recent work in the areas of (a) control and planning, (b) state estimation and mapping, and (c) coordinating large teams of robots.

BIO
VIJAY KUMAR is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and on sabbatical leave at White House Office of Science and Technology Policy where he serves as the assistant director for robotics and cyber physical systems. He received his Bachelors of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1987. He has been on the Faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania since 1987.

Dr. Kumar served as the Deputy Dean for Research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2000-2004. He directed the GRASP Laboratory, a multidisciplinary robotics and perception laboratory, from 1998-2004. He was the Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from 2005-2008. He then served as the Deputy Dean for Education in the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2008-2012.

Dr. Kumar is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2003), a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (2005) and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2013).

Dr. Kumar's research interests are in robotics, specifically multi-robot systems, and micro aerial vehicles. He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics and the Springer Tract in Advanced Robotics (STAR). He is the recipient of the 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator award, the 1996 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (University of Pennsylvania), the 1997 Freudenstein Award for significant accomplishments in mechanisms and robotics, the 2012 ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award, the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award and a 2012 World Technology Network Award. He has won best paper awards at DARS 2002, ICRA 2004, ICRA 2011, RSS 2011, and RSS 2013, and has advised doctoral students who have won Best Student Paper Awards at ICRA 2008, RSS 2009, and DARS 2010.

[Airicist]

Article "Fifty planes in the air running ROS & Gazebo (https://robohub.org/fifty-planes-in-the-air-running-ros-gazebo)"

by Open Source Robotics Foundation
September 23, 2015

[Airicist]

https://vimeo.com/148627068

GTRI UAS Swarm
December 11, 2015


Launch and overflight of GTRI UAS Swarm

[Airicist]

https://youtu.be/PcbwxJInUps

A Swarm of Flying Phones (CES 2016)

Published on Jan 6, 2016


This video showcases a research collaboration between our group at the University of Pennsylvania and Qualcomm Research in creating a swarm of autonomous flying robots powered by smartphones. The (800 g, 54 cm diameter) robot is designed and build at Penn. The sensing, sensor fusion, control, and planning are all done on an off-the-shelf Samsung Galaxy S5 phone using just the single camera and IMU available in the phone.
Multiple vehicles are able to plan safe trajectories avoiding intra-robot collisions, optimizing at the same time the given task and building in a cooperative manner the environment.
The work allows any consumer with multiple smartphones to autonomously to drive a swarm of multiple vehicles without GPS, by downloading an app, and cooperatively building 3-D maps.
This work was first presented at CES2016 in Las Vegas, NV.
Giuseppe Loianno, Yash Mulgaonkar, and Vijay Kumar.

[Airicist]

https://youtu.be/6zsuDVMSf3o

On-Board Relative Bearing Estimation for Teams of Drones Using Sound (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7403916)

Published on Mar 24, 2016


In a team of autonomous drones, individual knowledge about the relative location of teammates is essential. Existing relative positioning solutions for teams of small drones mostly rely on external systems such as motion tracking cameras or GPS satellites that might not always be accessible. In this letter, we describe an onboard solution to measure the 3-D relative direction between drones using sound as the main source of information. First, we describe a method to measure the directions of other robots from perceiving their engine sounds in the absence of self-engine noise. We then extend the method to use active acoustic signaling to obtain the relative directions in the presence of self-engine noise, to increase the detection range, and to discriminate the identity of robots. Methods are evaluated in real world experiments and a fully autonomous leader-following behavior is illustrated with two drones using the proposed system.

Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (https://pr.ai/showthread.php?2013)