Top TechTop Tech #35: All-seeing drones, Metamaterials radar, robot butterflies
Promising products and interesting innovations
Today’s Top Tech:
• Smarter drones emulate human vision and balance
• Better, cheaper high-end radar will let cars and drones see better
• Not Butterflies — winged drones
Smarter drones emulate human vision and balance
Quadcopters can be plenty dangerous, with four spinning blades ready to go out of control… but upcoming smarter drones could be thrown into the air by hand “like a baseball” and still recover stable flight, and land autonomously out of the operator’s line of sight.
The Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich equipped drones with a camera and acceleration sensors, with which the new orientation system emulates the human visual system and sense of balance, Phys Org reports.
The scientists note that potential crash situations arise particularly when drones temporarily lose their GPS position information, (when flying close to buildings for example) — and so “is essential that drones can rely on back-up systems and regain stable flight.” Also, as drones can run out of power, they must be able to detect safe landing spots and properly execute immediate landing operations. UZ’s computer-vision software analyses the images, identifies distinctive landmarks, and restores balance, all while running on a standard smartphone processor on the drone.
Better, cheaper high-end radar will let cars and drones see better
Advanced electronically scanning radar is usually too bulky and expensive, and so is limited to military fighter jets — but a new system steers outgoing radio waves with metamaterial lenses, and so may allow for drone-sized devices, at 1/1000th the cost.
Echodyne’s new electronically scanning radar instrument doesn’t have a conventional phase shifter, Technology Review reports. “Metamaterials provide a way to get around many of the physical limitations that have previously defined how engineers could control radio, light, and sound waves. For example, while conventional lenses need their characteristic shape to bend light rays into focus, a metamaterial lens can bend light the same way while being perfectly flat.” (Metamaterials are made from repeating structures that are smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation being manipulated.)
The radar systems used by the military typically start at around $100,000; Echodyne hopes to mass-produce compact radar systems that cost only hundreds or thousands of dollars, and could become standard sensor for autonomous cars and drones.
Not Butterflies — winged drones
They look like butterflies, dancing in the air.
But they’re robots.
The eMotion butterflies are made by German robotics company
Festo, and “could almost be mistaken for the real thing” Discovery reports.
Each weighs 32 grams and has battery life for four minutes of flight. The wings are made from elastic capacitor films and supported by thin carbon rods.
It’s not just the fake bugs that are innovative — it’s the swarm. The butterflies are “part of a swarming robotic system,” the article adds, “where the flying behavior of several drones — each with a wingspan of 50 centimeters — are coordinated to move around a room without bumping into the walls, objects or each other. The intelligent networking system relies on ten high-speed infrared cameras positioned around a room where the bionic butterflies fly. The cameras track infrared markers on each butterfly and send information in real time to a master computer that coordinates the movements of the swarm.”
Here is a video of the robots in motion.
There’s more information on the many more insects the roboticists are making here.
