How to: DIY Swarm of Aerial Robots!
This Linux-based “swarming micro air vehicle” project is a fairly simple, yet impressive build. The robotics project uses a fleet of micro-light flying robots to made out of polypropylene sheets. Weighing just 420g and with a wingspan of 80cms, they are propelled by an electric motor that runs on small LiPo batteries (max battery life is 30 minutes). The aerial robots fly on autopilot which controls altitude, airspeed and turn rate. A microcontroller in the autopilot chooses the most economical flight strategy taking feedback from three sensors: a gyroscope and two pressure sensors.
Although the UAVs are typicalls on autopilot, they can be monitored and controlled from an interface on a laptop. The beauty of the swarm is in the way each plane communicates wirelessly with the others to maintain the objective of the swarm.
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September 29th, 2010
amazing work.
September 30th, 2010
How is this a howto or diy ? unless I’m missing something it’s the typical edu-does-corporate deal with absolutely no information other than vague stuff and theoretical papers designed to attract corporate interest. It looks like they’ve simply bought Swinglets from senseFly – a mere $9k apiece to you my son, and written some code for them.
October 1st, 2010
It’s not a step by step how-to, but the image above shows which technologies are used if you wanted to build your own.
October 20th, 2010
Its not diy hoby stuff, its a full on, government funded research project done by a professional academic institution (the opposite of DIY.) Maybe the point is to inspire regular joes like us to do a similar project? If so there really isn’t enough info here to do that, and as mentioned in another comment, all of the equipment they used was store bought.
October 20th, 2010
Yes, it was posted for inspirational purposes.
March 12th, 2011
http://www.diydrones.com for more info