Morgen E. Peck is a contributing writer at Txchnologist and Txchnologist Brasil, an online science and technology magazine. She has written about programs to drag space junk out of orbit, technology that could print houses and how to build a house on Mars.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If there were swarms of palm-sized robots to witness the action, it would.
Quadrotors are miniature flying robots. University of Pennsylvania deputy dean Vijay Kumar introduced the tech marvels during his TED talk. He showed them flipping in the air like playful otters, flying sideways and working together to build a tower of blocks.
Kumar has suggested that the quadrotors could be useful for scanning disaster zones, but a former student of Kumar's in Brazil added that they could potentially function as tiny, silent guardians of the rainforest.
Mario Campos, a professor of computer science who runs his own robotics laboratory at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, said the robots could be used to capture live video of the rainforest, aiding in an effort to detect and respond quickly to illegal deforestation and fires.
"The Size of My Palm"
Brazil has been putting eyes in the sky for over a decade now, sending fixed-wing drones over the forest canopy to detect illegal drug trafficking and mining, as well as environmental crimes. But those vehicles require human operators, while Kumar's quadrotors can be programmed to fly autonomously in swarms.
And now these intelligent flying robots are smaller than ever.
"I think what has happened in the last six months or so is the concerted effort to make the platform smaller," says Kumar, a member of Penn's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab. "It's about the size of my palm. The span is less than eight inches."
The robot's body is the shape of a cross, and a little rotor blade attaches to the end of each arm. When all of the rotors are spinning at the same speed, the robot rises or hovers. But when they spin at varying speeds, the body tilts forward or swivels. An onboard processor can change the commands to the rotors 600 times per second, allowing the machine to respond quickly to changes in its environment. Throw it in the air and it will glide right into a controlled flight pattern.
Disconnected Teamwork
Watching one of these inorganic creatures gracefully dive through a hoop as it's thrown up in the air is impressive enough. Seeing many of them work as a team is stunning, and slightly unnerving.
In his TED talk, Kumar explained how a swarm of robots, lacking the ability to communicate with one another in any way, can work together to build a structure, lifting blocks and putting them in place. Each robot has the same blueprint and the ability to sense changes in its environment, but has no direct connection with the other units in the swarm.
The programs that control these flights were inspired by the way ants cooperate to move large chunks of food, but Kumar says his team could just as easily have looked to humans.
Consider how two people would go about moving a table if they were blindfolded in a room. "I don't have to know exactly how your brain is wired. I don't need to know your name. I don't even have to know what you look like," says Kumar. "I'm going to move the table in a way that I think is appropriate. Nobody's telling me what to do and nobody's telling you what to do."
Flying Through the Treetops
The smarts that keep the robots from colliding while building would also enable them to dart through obstacles in a jungle canopy. "They want to fly right over the treetops, maybe through the treetops and these are things we could do," says Kumar.
These abilities seem to be perfectly suited for monitoring the rainforest. Farmers and loggers in Brazil are required to follow conservation laws when taking down trees on their property, but often flout the rules. "This is one of the key problems for the region," says Campos.
Campos has one major concern. "Besides several birds, mammals, reptiles species, the Amazon forest is the habitat of myriads of insects. Their wellbeing could be jeopardized in the monitoring process," he says. Before quadrotors are released into the jungle, it would be best to know that they aren't going to harm the very ecosystem they've been deployed to protect.
But, if deployed carefully, the robots could be sentinels of crucial environmental protection.
What do you think? Do you think rainforests deserve tiny spies? Where else could this technology apply?
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Nicolas Halftermeyer
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