Tiny Drone Squadron

Swarm Micro-UAVs: Vijay Kumar, Shaojie Shen, Matthew Turpin (University of Pennsylvania); Nathan Michael (Carnegie Mellon University); Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev (KMel Robotics)

In the future the first responders for many disasters could include flying robots, sent in to map dangerously compromised buildings. A team of engineers, led by the University of Pennsylvania's Vijay Kumar, is developing autonomously flying nano quadrotors that can fly in squadrons and pull off incredible tasks. They can spontaneously create maps or assemble a miniature truss structure out of a kit of parts. Each quadrotor has an onboard mobile processor and sensors for gauging how to move through the air while also accounting for obstacles and wind, plus a short-range wireless antenna for communicating with other drones. Those capabilities help the drones weave figure-eight patterns in the air and stream through windows without crashing. The long-term applications include construction and environmental monitoring.But disaster response may come first. Nathan Michael, a former student of Kumar's who is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon, predicts the search-and-rescue community will be using small flying-swarm robots in the next three to five years. "In the long term, UAVs may change how we think about the whole cycle of disaster," Michael says. "Not just responding to the aftermath but preventing losses beforehand by mapping out challenging environments."