
How to prevent drones falling from the sky
Drone shows are very impressive to watch, but not always without problems. On YouTube you can find examples of drones, falling from the sky!
MIT researchers worked on a training method for ‘multi agent’ systems like drones, robots and self driving cars. In real-world demonstrations, the team trained a small number of palm-sized drones to safely carry out different objectives, from simultaneously switching positions midflight to landing on designated moving vehicles on the ground. In simulations, the researchers showed that the same programs, trained on a few drones, could be copied and scaled up to thousands of drones, enabling a large system of agents to safely accomplish the same tasks.
“This could be a standard for any application that requires a team of agents, such as warehouse robots, search-and-rescue drones, and self-driving cars,” says Chuchu Fan, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “This provides a shield, or safety filter, saying each agent can continue with their mission, and we’ll tell you how to be safe.”
In many ways the training was comparable on how humans navigate, like in a shopping mall: we move, see the obstacle and its path and change our own path to avoid bumping into another person or object. This pretty much how the trained drones navigate. They calculate a path, compare that with the paths of other drones and adjust their position and movement.
Fan and her colleagues report on their new method in a study appearing this month in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
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