Insect-like robots that fly and cooperate

Vijay Kumar, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a talk at last week’s TED2012 that got some attention.

In his lab, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams – for construction, surveying disasters and far more.

At TED2012, Kumar demonstrated a robot built like a cross, with four rotors, each on an end of the cross pointed straight up. Independent control of the rotors, in all directions plus yaw, gives exquisite control, he noted.


The advantage of being small is tremendous, researchers claimed. The smaller a robot, the quicker it can turn and maneuver.

Dynamics of the quadrotor is defined by mathematics in twelve-dimensional space. But there is a mathematical trick to make it tractable — and it can be done in a fraction of a second, even with moving obstacles, researchers noted.

The four-rotor robot was created by two students, Alex Kushleyev and Daniel Mellinger. It consumes 15 watts of power and is about 8 inches in diameter.


“Robots like this have many applications,” said Kumar in his speech at TED2012. “You can send them inside buildings as first responders to look for intruders, maybe look for biochemical leaks … [or they] can be used for construction and for transporting cargo.”

He continued: “Robots like this can be sent to collapsed buildings to assess the damage of disasters or sent to map nuclear radiation levels after a nuclear accident.”

The autonomous quadrotor is controlled to precisely fly along aggressive trajectories. Flips, flight through windows, and perching on surfaces are demonstrated in the video.

Surprisingly, throughout all video sequences, there is no mention about surveillance and military applications.

Do you also see both commercial and military usage? What do you think?

If you found this article to be of interest, visit Military/Aerospace Designline where you will find the latest and greatest design, technology, product, and news articles with regard to all aspects of military, defense and aerospace.