Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building
botjunkie.com
botjunkie.com
Anything programmed by humans is a "dumb machine doing exactly what they are told." I think you meant that to mean each individual step was hardcoded. I don't think it was. I think they were all following the same algorithm. The group certainly spends a lot of time on path planning: http://repository.upenn.edu/grasp_papers/
It still doesn't look very swarm-like to me (more like some kind of planner algorithm; I know the quote implies a distributed intelligence, but look at the way they queue always in exactly the same place, do laps, etc etc), but that certainly sounds more promising.
This appears to be a "multi-body" problem (rather than a "multi-agent") problem: that is, there is likely one primary decision-maker which dictates the construction task ordering, likely computed via a partial-order multi-body planner. That's part 1 of the AI.
But there's another part that's equally interesting. The multi-body planner produces a series of construction steps. Each step is ordered with regard to certain steps, unordered with regard to other steps (these can be done in any order but not simultaneously), and explicitly declared parallel with yet other steps (they can be done simultaneously). The quad-roters grab the steps and perform them in parallel when possible, and at least form a queue otherwise. Last, the quad-rotors have to perform these steps without hitting one another, so there's a significant real-time multi-body path-planning problem involved.
Multi-body planning, scheduling, and plan monitoring is nontrivial and should not be so lightly dismissed.
Once GPS gets sub-meter accuracy, then we should start worrying.
Sensors designed for computer vision applications are surprisingly light and small! Board-level cameras can fit in the palm of your hand, and reasonable IMUs are not much bigger than a matchbox. The biggest obstacles today are tradeoffs between performance/weight and performance/battery life. The platform needs algorithms with acceptable results, requiring almost no supporting hardware, and that are robust to the thousands of things that go wrong when trying to sense (noise, errors, resolution, occlusions, etc). Algorithms that fit all of these requirements are very uncommon. In fact, I would not be surprised if there was an Iron Triangle in there somewhere.
[0] Inertial Measurement Units: Devices that estimate acceleration (or some other measure of movement).
[1] Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Using stereo vision, lidar, radio ranging, etc. to estimate your position, plus how the environment looks.
You can get about 1cm of ranging error (median), and say 10cm of positioning error.
Navigational issues resolved, I have a hard time seeing these things having trouble with a modest wind.
A constant wind I agree looks like it would be within their capabilities, though their route planning software would need to take account of it and approach the target from upwind by default - not impossible but another thing to account for.
The real issue for me is gusting. They are definitely small and light enough that power-to-weight issues, particularly when carrying a load with a higher surface area to the wind than the craft itself, means that it will get knocked off course by gusts. That obviously needs allowing for when navigating to and from the construction site, but particularly when dropping off a load - if the release comes at the same point as the gust, the part simply won't end up where they wanted.
Do I think all of these problems are unsolvable? No, but it makes a useful simplifying assumption for their version 1 that they don't have to deal with any of them because they're flying indoors.
Or once the kinect shrinks to size of a short stack of quarters.
Pickup --> Travel --> Deploy --> Return to pickup
However, MAVs (micro air vehicles) could reach into places where cranes wouldn't be able - i.e. inside the building. Also you can have many more MAVs working at the same time than cranes, so MAVs might be able to considerably speed up the building process.
For instance, I was noticing that while you might not want to use magnets for everything in your building, you could use them as a guide during that intermediate period where the robot can't just put things together, but they can be mostly correct. Magnets could be used to do things like guide pieces of wood together with a sheath containing powerful magnets, then the wood can screwed together, then the sheaths recovered and used again on some other bits of wood.
Everything about building a house may change; for instance, a few years ago there were some news stories about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fhryxVAsa4&eurl%20= only scaled up to human residence sizes, which is obviously not that tricky. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NSX/is_7_49/ai_n6149... Cheap robot labor changes what the cheapest houses are.
The biggest challenge may very well be keeping codes up to date. I suspect that the crossover may very well be swift when it happens; robots are improving very rapidly and when they cross the line where they are a more cost-effective way to build a house, they aren't going to sort of edge up to it and pull alongside it, they're going to blow right past it and keep going.
Times are tough now but the next several decades still stand to be very interesting times, in all senses of the phrase.
(Oh, and personally I don't think flying robots have much future in construction. The economics are nonsense, excepting cargo helicopters, which are regularly used for some purposes today. I'm more speaking in general.)
Generally, the duration of construction is determined by economics and weather. Flying robots probably don't provide an advantage on either front.
There may be some applications for MAV's for the inspection of construction. But there's an off the shelf solution already availible [http://www.amazon.com/Air-Hogs-Hawk-Eye-Channel/dp/B00395EJR...]
Once you are free of that limitation, applications of this technique on varying scales opens up a new "world" of possibilities.
Pipelining/Parallelization could be achieved by throwing more bots at the problem.
Let's imagine they get the machines scaled to the point when they could build an actual habitable structure, and that they sort the power concerns that I suspect would make it insurmountably uneconomic.
Now, imagine a squad of sufficiently large and powerful helicopters buzzing away all day next to your office. How many people are going to be OK with that?
Lots of small components means more joints. With a brick as our example that's fine but I'm not convinced the gain over a squad of fairly cheap bricklayers is there - with a girder frame structure as is more typical for large commercial premises that means for the same design it's simultaneously weaker, heavier and more expensive. Not a trio of attributes I'd want to apply to my structure.
This is a sort of technology I love, that's clearly very interesting and with all sorts of potential. But I don't see construction as the ideal target market for it, by a long way. Freight unloading would have been a great case had it not gone containerised some years ago. Warehouse order picking as with Amazon et al? Perhaps. You can have the storage floor as a controlled space without people underneath which reduces the safety issues and there wouldn't be the same problem with noise nuisance. If we wanted to go down that road though I'm not sure it's a big enough win over cranes / arms and conveyor belts, or that either is a win over fairly cheap people pushing trolleys (having worked alongside exactly that in the past).
If we want to stick with construction it would make good sense for use in hazardous environments because it would provide a way of deploying a large, highly mobile force to an area where you couldn't deploy human labour (or where that deployment becomes severely impractical / unattractive for whatever reason - see the film 'Moon' for example), but I'm not sure that's a large enough market to justify the expense of developing the tech enough to make it fully usable. There doesn't seem to currently be a shortage of labour prepared to go and work in Siberian gold mines or northern Canadian tar sands quarries, for the right price, and I can't see the power technology for these devices scaling to the point to make them likely cheaper any time soon to invest in it.
Cool tech searching for a better application IMHO. I'd love to see that better application though and would be heading down there to watch when it happened.
I relatively regularly have the local police helicopter overhead and it's definitely loud enough to keep people awake, sometimes to wake you up in the first place. A whole fleet of these withing 1/4 mile of you will be loud, noticeably louder than a usual construction crew, and I'm still concerned about the neighbours complaining about the risk of this fleet of robot helicopters crashing into each other or dropping parts. Really, I think this is a very cool tech but a mad application of it that I really can't ever see working.
Its Socialism when we all work for the collective.
What do you call it when nobody works?
There are many complex processes being performed at construction sites. Many steps take highly optimized machines to perform robotically but that a single human can do just by changing tools.
Because of these processes, automating the entire construction process would be very expensive to do right at the site.
All parts would have be modularized so they could be snapped together. Or robots will have to be able to change tools. Or parts will have to be moved from robot to robot, with as much work being done before parts are actually brought to the site.
Either way, it will be interesting to see how it works out.
They'd need two batteries in a drone to do that of course, or perhaps some other robot could execute the battery swap.
EDIT: that piece of 2x4 looks to be about 12 inches long. Assuming the wood is pine (likely, and also light), and using 350kg/m^3 as the pine's density (http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_wood.htm the lightest figure quoted) that works out to about .55 kg. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=350+kg%2Fm^3+*+%282*4*1...). Quite impressive.
http://translogic.aolautos.com/2011/01/06/ces-2011-gm-brings...
Make a structure of actual use, like a tiny bridge across a moat that could hold people. The magnets have got to go.
You might have several different types of crawler. A couple to receive materials from the quadrotor and hold them in place while a third follows a weld pattern.