VeriDrone project: building quadcopters people can bet their lives on [video]

ucsd-pl.github.io

21 points·BmoreDaniel··4 comments

Yes! The world needs this kind of work. I would prefer my flight control computers to be free of bugs, provably.

DARPA just concluded a program to do exactly this, and I wonder if Veridrone was funded as part of their efforts:

http://www.darpa.mil/program/high-assurance-cyber-military-s...

A lot of the work that went into formally verifying various aspects of drone and car software for HACMS was open sourced in DARPA's Open Catalog, found here:

http://opencatalog.darpa.mil/HACMS.html

I work on the VeriDrone project. We did not receive any funding from the HACMS project, but we have begun working with some folks from the SMACCMPilot project (http://smaccmpilot.org/index.html) that was funded by HACMS. We hope to eventually integrate with their platform in order to benefit from the guarantees they provide such as memory safety.

Another step towards my dream of an Uber-for-'Skyhook'-style-personal-drone-transport!

('Skyhook' was a cold-war era technology for lifting people up to planes flying overhead, kind of a reverse-parachute, involving baloons & long tether-lines:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery... )

From the wiki:

"Fulton first used instrumented dummies as he prepared for a live pickup. He next used a pig, as pigs have nervous systems close to humans. Lifted off the ground, the pig began to spin as it flew through the air at 125 mph (200 km/h). It arrived on board uninjured but in a disoriented state. Once it recovered, it attacked the crew."

Some pig.

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