Uh-oh. Someone taught drones to team up to open the doors

There are many drones designed to fly inland. You know what these drones can not do, though? Open doors. At least, it's true in 99% of cases. Fortunately, the tiny Flycrotug microdrone is the exception to the rule – all it needs is a partner drone and its trusty lbado.

During a demonstration demonstration, the creators of Flycrotug showed how two drones could connect their onboard cables to a door handle, attach them to the floor using adhesive feet, and then open the door using built-in winches. This is only one example of how drones could interact with their environment. Other examples might include removing a debris blocking their way. The objects that drones are able to shoot can weigh up to 40 times their own weight.

"We have designed a design for micro-air vehicles that allows them to anchor in their environment – similar to insects – and pull much heavier loads. Matthew Estrada, a graduate student at Stanford University, who worked on the project, told Digital Trends. "This concerns a persistent limitation of small air vehicles: they are very mobile, but can only exert forces approximately twice as heavy as those of propellers. This is an exciting progress because it could allow them to perform tasks for which we usually send bigger robots. "

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Estrada said that an application for these tiny landscapes-manipulative drones could be the subject of search and rescue tasks . They could be particularly useful when they involve confined or remote environments, where other robots would have trouble adapting or reaching. This could mean slipping through a crevbade or the window of a partially collapsed building to clear a path or retrieve an object of interest to the rescuers.

"It's really a beginning and there are a lot of interesting questions to make it a practical method. in unfamiliar environments, where they would encounter a variety of different mounting surfaces and obstacles with which they would need to interact, "he continued. "Planning the maneuvers for handling tasks and generalizing the equipment so that it attaches to more and more varied surfaces are two interesting axes for future work."

An article describing this research was recently published in the journal Science Robotics.