
Watch a swarm of flying robotic drones construct a tiny building - coffee
http://www.botjunkie.com/2011/01/14/autonomous-quadrotor-teams-may-build-your-next-house/
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andrewcooke
I'm going to be a pedant here - that does not look like a swarm, and they
don't claim it is (in the video, at least). By "swarm" I would understand that
all have the same programming and that the assembly process is emergent from
simpler instructions plus exploration and feedback. Instead they appear to be
programmed to act sequentially with a pre-planned set of actions. There is no
feedback, no emergence. In short, it's nowhere near as cool as you seem to
think it is. It's just a bunch of dumb machines doing exactly what they are
told to do, with no smarts.

~~~
scott_s
No smarts? From their behavior, I got the impression that the robots were
assessing what was the next step in construction, which included assessing if
another robot was still working on construction. They also had to avoid
collisions.

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/>

~~~
andrewcooke
Actually, you may be more right than you know (sorry). I've found this quote:
"We tell the quadrotors what structure﻿ to build and they figure out the
assembly plan and then build it."
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W18Z3UnnS_0&feature=play...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W18Z3UnnS_0&feature=player_embedded)

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.

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yellowbkpk
This lab has several other videos with quad rotor robots like this (e.g.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM>), but don't worry about them
escaping and starting a robot domination: they rely on infrared motion capture
systems in that room for extremely precise location sensing.

Once GPS gets sub-meter accuracy, then we should start worrying.

~~~
sliverstorm
GPS + Accelerometer is already pretty darn accurate, I'm not really sure why
they use the IR room. Perhaps simply easier to set up, and easier to co-
ordinate the bots?

~~~
eftpotrm
These things don't look very powerful, to put it mildly. GPS means outdoors
which means wind which is a bit harder for a small, light hovering robot to
handle. Indoor lets them demonstrate the principle with a useful simplifying
assumption of no wind.

~~~
burgerbrain
Did you watch the same videos I did? They have these things lifting sizeable
pieces of 2x4's (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBsJwapanWI>) and they pull
of some pretty absurd manoeuvring
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM>) and recovery
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geqip_0Vjec>).

Navigational issues resolved, I have a hard time seeing these things having
trouble with a modest wind.

~~~
eftpotrm
Yes, I did see the same videos. And I still think no wind is a useful
simplifying assumption for them, particularly on power grounds.

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.

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iamwil
Pretty neat! I'm sure they'll get to it eventually, but there's no advantage
to having three drones in this demo, since the work isn't pipelined. It seems
that a drone has to wait until one finishes picking stuff up before it can
pick up something itself.

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AdamTReineke
Right, but they're saving travel time. When one drone is flying back to grab a
piece, the next drone is lowering a piece into place.

~~~
gridspy
Indeed. Because the work IS pipelined

Pickup --> Travel --> Deploy --> Return to pickup

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brudgers
Interesting, but robotic cranes on the ground would seem to be more efficient
and reliable in ordinary circumstances. It's not a question of how to grip it,
It's a simple question of weight ratios.

~~~
mitko
What you say makes sense - robotic cranes should be able to operate with
heavier pieces, and will require less energy per piece placement.

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.

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RodgerTheGreat
There's no reason you can't combine these approaches. Using larger ground-
based equipment to move girders and small, flying machines to do things like
interior finishing makes a lot of sense.

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brudgers
A 4x8 sheet of 1/2" Gypsum board weighs nearly 60 pounds. A five gallon bucket
of paint weighs about the same. A quadrotor couldn't finish an office because
it would be too large to fit through the door...never mind the rotating
blades.

~~~
jerf
You're right. But. As robotics becomes practical for building, we will not
just replace human with robots. We will change how we build to make it easier
to build with robots.

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=](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...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NSX/is_7_49/ai_n6149111/)
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.)

~~~
mturmon
It's funny, people have been talking about prefab houses (related, but not the
same, as on-site robotic assembly) for years, but they still are a niche item.
Despite all kinds of efforts to popularize them, such as:

<http://www.dwell.com/magazine/the-prefab-issue.html>

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d5tryr
I've been cleaning up after a flood disaster for the past few days, the most
amazing technology i've seen in that time is the bobcats and their drivers. It
takes 10-15 people a few hours to empty a house of all it's waterlogged
belongings on to the street, and then 15 minutes for the bobcat to get it up
on the back of a truck. When I see a tech demo like this I'm very optimistic
about it's potential for disaster relief, where simple structures, shelters,
and platforms would be of great benefit.

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netcan
Brisbane?

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thebigredjay
I like the audible menacing drone. Any autonomous robot should emit a menacing
drone.

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eftpotrm
Great fun, but I suspect NIMBY concerns would kill any practical application.

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?

~~~
pg
Why couldn't small drones build things out of small elements? A lot of our
assumptions about what is a reasonable unit of work are based on examples with
humans in the loop. It might make more sense to think of a fleet of these
things as a form of 3D printer.

~~~
eftpotrm
Lots of them working together means active traffic management becomes critical
to prevent collisions. That'll be regulated because even if they're moving
things the size of bricks rather than I beams, do you want to see what happens
when two hovering robots each carrying a brick 5 metres off the ground bump
into each other and suddenly stop hovering? Or if they start creating
turbulence for each other and interfere with flight even without contact? Even
if it doesn't get regulated by law the insurance implications would force _de
facto_ regulation.

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.

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jaekwon
Next I want these drones to make hexagonal structures and feed off of flower
polen.

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siculars
Wow, unions are gonna hate these.

~~~
BrandonM
The shortsightedness of people worried about fewer jobs because of new
technology is ridiculous. If you can build a house for the cost of land and
materials only, the cost of living is lowered for everyone. With enough
advancement and automation, the cost of life's necessities drops. As it
decreases, the amount of human labor necessary to support day-to-day life will
drop with it. Eventually we'll be able to support ourselves with very little
laborious work, focusing instead on content production and other interesting
and creative endeavors. Why try to prevent that?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Its Capitalism when everyone works for themselves (ok, the money works for
them).

Its Socialism when we all work for the collective.

What do you call it when nobody works?

~~~
siculars
Arabia? Greece? Hehehe.

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ph0rque
This tech would have a great application in robotic fruit-picking/pruning
applications.

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onteria
I highly recommend checking out The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and
Perception (GRASP)'s other projects as well:

<http://www.grasp.upenn.edu/research>

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btipling
I think flying swarm rebotics would be best weaponized. You could call them
hack-mans, man-chops, person-hacks...HRM

~~~
stevenbedrick
Who do you think comprise the biggest funders this sort of research?

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stretchwithme
Robotic construction will eventually take over the construction industry.
Especially once robotic transportation becomes possible.

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.

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wglb
This is just way too much fun.

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shaunfs
This is awesome! It's sort of like a less precise large-scale 3D printer or
MineCraft. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks this is certainly the
beginning of automated construction. It works for assembly lines. We may
finally be getting to the point where the same process will work in more
mobile volatile environments.

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soamv
The power limitation doesn't seem very difficult to surmount, a drone could
just go swap its dead battery with one from a pool of batteries on chargers,
and keep working.

They'd need two batteries in a drone to do that of course, or perhaps some
other robot could execute the battery swap.

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fara
robots building robots. that would be cool

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johnohara
Anybody know the weight of each column?

~~~
burgerbrain
In another video they show 4 of them working together to lift a 1.2 kg
structure, and they don't seem to have much trouble with it. It also shows a
single copter lifting a piece of 2x4 several inches long, but doesn't give the
weight. As just a ballpark guess I'd say these things probably max out at
lifting and flying with a little under half a kg, they don't seem to have any
trouble with at least .25 kg. The columns in the video linked at the top of
the page are most likey a lot lighter than that, simply because there's no
need for them to be heavy.

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...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=350+kg%2Fm^3+*+%282*4*12%29+inches^3)).
Quite impressive.

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hanula
"...May Build Your Next House". Yea, right. All in all it's designed to kill
people in the end.

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fakespastic
Imagine the damage virii of the future will be able to do to our
infrastructure...

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grimatongueworm
36 battery changes later...

~~~
burgerbrain
No problem. These things can do precision landing so there's no reason they
couldn't juice themselves back up in shifts.

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maeon3
Great show, but there needs to be another device (carried by the quad rotors)
to create very strong bonds between the parts. If the quad rotors could carry
this bond-making robot that temporarily attaches to the parts and joins pieces
with adhesive/nailgun/puzzle-piece fit, then they would be on to something.

Make a structure of actual use, like a tiny bridge across a moat that could
hold people. The magnets have got to go.

~~~
gridspy
What would be cooler would be a completely separate bond-building robot that
can weld / whatever and can independently traverse the completed building.
When it was too far from its next destination a quadrotor would come and give
it a lift.

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.

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GrandMasterBirt
I think the part connection is just an implementation detail. They can make
these guys place something and another robot attaches.

~~~
ars
It's not. Their positioning is inaccurate, and the magnet helps guide to the
final position.

