- Title: HUNGARY: Autonomous drones learn to fly as a flock
- Date: 20th March 2014
- Summary: BUDAPEST, HUNGARY (RECENT, 2014) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) TAMAS VICSEK, PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR AND PROFESSOR OF PHYSICS OF ELTE BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS DEPARTMENT SAYING: "One of our favourable examples for potential application is just to release a fleet of these drones over an agricultural field and tell them that 'cover the whole field and look for any problematic places or artificial pollination is a potential application so just cover everything and so the farmer can take 50 of these, release them, give them the co-ordinates of only the field, the borderline of the field, the rest is done automatically by these drones."
- Embargoed: 4th April 2014 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Hungary
- Country: Hungary
- Topics: Conflict,Defence / Military,Technology
- Reuters ID: LVA29JH4L7EAY92JOHLQUG9IIVUZ
- Story Text: In a demonstration on a field outside Budapest, Hungary, Tamas Vicsek's (Pron: Tamazh Vit-chek) ten autonomous quadcopters fly in formation, communicating with each other to achieve a designated task - in this case flying in a circle - while avoiding collisions.
Unlike other drone flocking technologies, Vicsek's requires no external computer giving directions. His drones are programmed to perform a general task and to achieve it as efficiently as possible out of doors, by cooperating with each other, much like birds in a flock.
Vicsek and his team, from ELTE University say they were interested in the collective motions of all kinds of animals. They applied small GPS devices on pigeons first but then hit apon the idea of building quadcopters that imitate birds.
"The big jump in our case is to have them co-operate with each other, to have them act on their own, and out-door in an autonomous way. For this they have to communicate with each other and the communication has to be fast enough and reaction time has to be short enough," said Vicsek, principal investigator and professor of physics at ELTE.
There have been two similar tedchnologies developed in other countries, Vicsek says, but one works only indoor and needs a large computer, and the other is based on small airplanes and not copters and they have to fly all the time, cannot hover and therefore cannot do formations.
Vicsek says his team at the physics department have taken ordinary drones and given them 'brains'.
"We have three types of contributions on this drone. First of all we developed a hardware layer that creates high-level steering commands. Instead of someone holding a remote control and manually controlling the drone we have hardware that automatically calculates these steering signals," robotic project leader Gabor Vasarhelyi (Pron: Gar-bor Vazha-halyi) said.
As a little touch of simplicity they used plastic salad bowls to cover and protect the 'brain' units on the copters and soon, their experiments bore fruit and they managed to have the drones perform various tasks in a co-ordinated way.
"Our copters have a little brain on the top of them. It's a Linux-based full blown very small sized computer which can make all the calculations and make the decisions. The decisions are not very complex: I have to go left, I have to go right, I have to go faster, slower but there is an overall task, lets say that they know that they have to form a circle, that's the task. They calculate the radius of the circle by calculating how many of them are in the air at the same time. They communicate so they know that 'now there are nine of us'," Vicsek said.
One of the more interesting tasks, Vicsek says, was to ask the drones to squeeze through a narrow imaginary channel in the air. To achieve the task, each of thr drones had to arrange themselves autonomously and proceed throguh the imaginary channel in order without colliding. Vicsek says the drones employ three rules of flight - attraction, alignment and repulsion - based on calculations derived from GPS signals they use to navigate. As they calculate the angles required to achieve the goal in cooperation with others in thre flock, they respond to one another accordingly.
some kind of a repulsion, an imaginary repulsion, Vicsek explained. Eventually it becomes a real force where they calculate the angles by which they have to change.
The autonomously flocking drones have significant practical application potential, Vicsek says. He says he's been contacted by representatives of many industries since the team's findings were published a few weeks ago.
"One of our favourable examples for potential application is just to release a fleet of these drones over an agricultural field and tell them that 'cover the whole field and look for any problematic places or artificial pollination is a potential application so just cover everything and so the farmer can take 50 of these, release them, give them the co-ordinates of only the field, the borderline of the field, the rest is done automatically by these drones."
But Vicsek admits the technology is not perfect. Communicating via GPS and radio sometimes causes delays that disrupts cooperation in flight and leads to occasional jamming. He says that equipping the drones with cameras so they can "see" one another should lead to improvements and hopes it won't be too long before flocking quadcopters are as ubiquitous over farmers' fields as flocks of birds. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
- Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2014. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
- Usage Terms/Restrictions: None