Drone Swarms: If One Is Good, Then How About A Whole Bunch?

#drone, #swarm, #inspections, #racing, #robotics,

By now just about everyone is familiar with drones. No matter if you have seen YouTube videos of people filming events, racing them, flying over New York / New Jersey or from the war in Ukraine it seems like drones are in the news almost every day. In fact, you might even own one of these yourself.

There is no doubt that a drone has become a valuable tool for doing a number of things such as inspecting power lines, following whales, making movies, etc. However, what comes next? Where do we go from here? It turns out that being able to control a single drone and have it fly to a location and perhaps do something is very valuable. However, what would you do if you wanted to take a lot of something to a location or do something there over and over again? Yes, you could fly your drone there, do it, fly it back, outfit it again, then rinse and repeat; however, the time and effort involved in doing this would potentially be prohibitive. There has to be a better way...

It turns out that there might be a better way: swarms. You and I already know about swarms. How many times in the Fall have we looked up into the sky and seen massive groups of birds following each other as they swoop and migrate? It turns out that fish do the same thing. Since swarming already exists in nature, perhaps we can learn something from the creatures that already do this and apply it to not only drones but to robotics in general. What would that look like?

Good news: you have an opportunity to find out. In this presentation we're going to be taking a look at the cutting edge research that is going into finding out how swarms work in nature with the plan to take this knowledge and apply it to robotics and drones. In the not too distant future you might look up and see a swarm of drones heading off to look for a lost child, inspect a failing dam, or deliver needed supplies. How that's going to happen is what we'll be talking about...

Join us by registering to attend this event and we'll see you there!