Kind: captions
Language: en
in a lab at the University of
Pennsylvania VJ Kumar is funded in part
by the military to create autonomous
drones that don't need external links
and like us can sense their environment
what you see on this robot are these two
chips here which are essentially raid
gyroscopes these play the same role as
the semicircular canals in the human
body located near the ears which
essentially tell us
orientation so the r gyroscopes that are
on board can actually measure these
angular velocities at thousands of times
a
second this chip here is the
accelerometer and this allows the robot
to sense accelerations in the lateral
Direction so these are analogs to the
oth organs that measure acceleration in
the human head when a human pilot feels
an unexpected change in acceleration he
knows to adjust the aircraft and the
robots do exactly the same thing the
sensors adjust the craft by changing the
relative velocities of the rotors and
allow the drones to follow a leader with
Precision a fundamental problem in
coordinating multiple robots is the
ability to maintain
formations what a robot has to do is
determine where its neighbors are and
figure out what the relative position is
and then monitor that relative
separation very
carefully you only need to tell one
robot how to move and the other robots
essentially maintain formation by just
keeping a specified relative
distance in the figure eight they come
within inches of each other so they have
to combat aerodynamic effects from their
neighbors and they have to have very
very precise
control and all that is done
autonomously the Precision of the robots
allows them to do some things more
quickly and accurately than human Pilots
can like predict the movement and the
shape shape of an object and adjust
accordingly in terms of acrobatics I
think it'll be hard to beat what a robot
can do the neuromuscular system in the
human body there may be delays of the
order of 80 milliseconds to 200
milliseconds before you actually take an
action in response to what you see Well
robots have this unfair Advantage they
can do these computations hundreds of
times a second um so your delays are of
the order of a millisecond and perhaps
even less in the lab the drones
communicate with a central computer that
uses motion capture an optical system
that tracks silver reflective markers on
the robots and tells them where they are
at all times but soon it may be possible
to cut the cord and they've already
developed another autonomous drone that
can go anywhere on its own