Engineering news
Engineers at the University at Buffalo, New York, have developed software to programme several drones to work together to map offshore oil spills.
The machines could be commercially available drones "that cost under $1,000,” says Souma Chowdhury, a mechanical engineer who developed the software. “All they need is to have a simple drone-mountable camera system, and use our software."
A five-drone swarm would map a nearly one-kilometre wide spill in nine minutes, he adds.
Inspired in part by the dynamics of a flock of birds, the researchers devised a method for the drones to quickly record whether they are over water, oil or the edge of the spill. The drones would share the information with the rest of the swarm, instead of sharing images or video - thus reducing the bandwidth requirement.
The swarm would move from point to point over the spill, avoiding going over space that other drones have already covered, and making observations every five seconds to determine the size of the spill. When batteries get low, the replacement drones would already have the data from their retired 'colleagues' to avoid previously mapped areas.
Using swarms of drones could "greatly reduce the risk of failure" and cost - if one drone is eliminated by obstacles, such as wind or birds, the others could complete the task, says David Corne, a roboticist at Heriot-Watt University who was not involved in the research. "The challenge is mainly the data processing, correcting for turbulence, GPS error, and so forth. With enough small cheap drones, and with algorithms getting cleverer and cleverer, this becomes less of an issue every day."
One challenge the team is working on at the moment is collision avoidance. To address the issue, the researchers are applying the results of a recent study by a team at the University of Queensland, where scientists conducted a tunnel experiment and observed that parrots never crash into each other by veering to the right.
The US engineers are experimenting with similar principles, so that drones can pre-emptively turn a certain angle to the right when they sense another flying member of the swarm.
Swarming drone technology has many potential applications, such as reconnaissance, exploration, rescue, and monitoring. "In all of these tasks, you tend to need to work in complex and hazardous environments, so you need cheapness and redundancy so that you can survive losses," says Corne.
The European Commission is currently funding swarm robotics research as part of Horizon 2020, and announced that
swarms of drones would map weeds on farms as part of a project last year.