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

There are many drones designed to fly inside. You know what these drones can not do, though? Open doors. At least, it's true in 99% of cases. Fortunately, the tiny microdrone Flycrotug is an exception to the rule – it lacks a partner drone and his faithful lasso.

During a proof-of-concept demonstration, the creators of Flycrotug showed how two drones could attach their on-board cables to a door handle, anchor themselves to the floor with adhesive feet, then open the door to the door. using on-board 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 concept for micro-air vehicles that allows them to anchor themselves in their environment – similar to insects – and tow loads much heavier than they can fly," Matthew Estrada, a graduate student of Stanford University, who worked on the project, said 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 drones handling landscapes could be used for 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 can mean slipping through a crevasse or the window of a partially collapsed building to clear a lane or recover an item of interest to rescuers.

"It's really a start and there are a lot of interesting questions to make it a practical method in unfamiliar environments, where they would encounter a variety of attachment surfaces and obstacles with which they would need to interact," was he continued. "Planning maneuvers for handling tasks and generalizing equipment to attach to more and more varied surfaces are two interesting areas for future work."

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