Aerial Construction – Building structures with flying machines | Hacker News Reader

Aerial Construction – Building structures with flying machines

idsc.ethz.ch

64 pointsvoska11 comments

I'm pretty impressed how the rotors always stayed away from the ropes. There must be some very interesting pathing algorithms in those.

With regard to line of sight and commercial drone operations in the US, POTUS issued a memo for the FAA and related govt agencies to figure out how to safely integrate UAVs into the NAS (National Air Space). The most immediate result has been the FAA's issuance of Section 333 Exemptions.

Within the Section 333 Exemption there is language regarding being able to see the drones that specifically states: the UA must be operated within VSOL (visual line of flight) of the Pilot in Command and all operations must use a Visual Observer; the UA must remain within VSOL of the visual oberserver; and the VO and PIC must be able to communicate verbally at all times (precludes texting or e messaging) during the flight.

The FAA has gone even further by requiring PICs be actual FAA licensed pilots.

This language works well for most commercial uses (construction, agriculture and photography) but virtually kills Amazon's hopes for an unmanned delivery network.

I was prepared to be skeptical but this is actually pretty cool. The thing that's never discussed, however, is that these demonstrations always require fast, accurate, and external motion capture systems (Vicon, etc), and wouldn't work outdoors. I'm not aware of anything that is currently available that will get close to this level of speed and accuracy for vehicle state estimation, which will make it very difficult to apply these techniques in real world situations.

Very cool proof of concept though.

If larger drones become reliable enough, maybe the construction industry can do away with cranes and scaffoldings.

If you make the object from lego bricks probably.

The same team has previously done work using drones to build structures out of bricks (rather than ropes):

http://www.idsc.ethz.ch/research-dandrea/research-projects/a...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/video-watch-...

Like helicopters? I know what you mean, I just had to point it out though :)

Using drones would be interesting, but how situationally aware can you be flying one? With an overhead crane you can maintain sight line almost always, and when you can you have people flagging but you still have a good sense of location because of boom and line placement.

With a drone can you see how close your props are to the surroundings? I'm not sure how good they are at self leveling, but that's pretty important as well. There a lot of small but important details about dropping a line into an area you can't see so it does have some hurdles to overcome but is possible.

It would be interesting if it could be automated. Using beacons to locate where the load has to go then setting it to hit a certain altitude before moving over into position. Then you don't have to worry about someone looking at a screen or flaggers giving the wrong signal. If it was fast enough it could make up for not being able to lift heavy but do more trips instead.

Hauling sheets of plywood up to roofers or packs of shingles would be a nice simple way to do this without lots of complexity.

Want to see this in the wild it seams to me that doing it in a room with camera sensors are reducing the complexity to much.

Not to mention the usefulness.

The scenario i would like to see is: I am out hiking and want to get over a river, take my drone out of my backpack attach a rope and let it build a bridge.

That is external cameras used for sensors...

This looks like a good plot twist for a movie.

Url changed from http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/19/watch-these-drones-build-..., which points to this.

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