Video: Drones avoid each other like awkward humans

No, I insist, after you. That awkward moment in the street is something drones can now share with us, thanks to an update for their navigation systems.

Parker Conroy and his team at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City have designed a collision-avoidance system that allows quadcopter drones to “see” each other and take steps to avoid crashing in mid-air. Cameras detect patterns on an oncoming quadcopter, and how large these appear allows the drone to gauge the approaching craft’s distance. The rate at which this changes can be used to work out their relative velocity. An off-board computer then calculates the area within which a collision could occur and tells the drone to take evasive action.

Sometimes, however, the drones misjudge the trajectory of their partner and dodge in the same direction. They automatically correct their paths, but for a moment they are engaged in a human-like “reciprocal dance”.


“It’s not often you see robots dancing on their own,” says Conroy, who now works for robot manufacturer Adept Technology. “If you’re walking down the hall, you yourself as a person are estimating the velocity of the other person and sometimes you make a mistake,” he says. “The same thing is happening with the robot and you get this situation where you both move to the same side.”

Artificial intuition

Mirko Kovac at Imperial College London’s new centre for flying robots says recent advances in artificial intelligence are faithfully reproducing animal behaviour more frequently, thanks to algorithms that give machines “instincts” rather than high-level intelligence about a situation.

“Instead of having something that’s very precise and computationally intensive, it’s more like having a low-level impulse. They run, see something, avoid it and keep on running, just like insects or animals do,” he says.

Kovac adds that flying robots of the future need to develop these instinctive capabilities, be more physically robust like bees or other flying insects, and do all processing on-board. “This research is an important step towards that,” he adds.

Michael Perry of major drone manufacturer DJI, says that this collision-avoidance technology will mean that future drones can be used out of the operator’s line of sight. “Delivery, long-range crop monitoring, pipe inspection – these tasks will be significantly easier if flight beyond the operator’s direct line of sight has collision avoidance safeguards,” he says.

Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/1411.3794