Synchronized drones are next wave in safety, surveillance
Rarely a day goes by without tales of another drone advancement, usually for deliveries to a remote area, something Amazon and other companies are pursuing.
It’s not here yet, but another futuristic use of drones is having large groups of quadcopters in packs, working together like bees, to assist in search and rescue, fire safety, coastal surveillance and other useful actions.
Researchers at the University of Southern California are hard at work on just that, looking to spend the next five years perfecting synchronized drones for prime time.
The advantage of multiple drones working together is that “if one fails, other ones can fulfill the gap,” USC computer science professor Nora Ayanian says. “With teams, you can be everywhere at once.”
We watched as Ayanian and her team demonstrated for us, having the computer start the process. Then the swarm of drones lifted off the floor, through the windows and back again. It’s what happens when they go outside into the real world researchers need to perfect.
Many of us watched as 300 synchronized drones flew together at the recent Super Bowl, in a demo performed by chip maker Intel, which has been showing off the technology at Disney World, as well. Like Intel, Ayanian’s drones are operated by computer and cameras, but they are tiny — like flying insects. Her research is all indoors in a controlled environment, where the “robots,” as she calls them, are trained to fly in and out of simulated windows and to spell the letters U-S-C. Synchronized drones at Disney and sporting events “are shows,” says Wolfgang Hoenig, a USC Ph.D. candidate working on the project. “We are using this for real applications.” When in shows, computers and manual controls are used to fly the drones, but Hoenig notes, “we’re fully automated. We tell the drones where to start and what the environment looks like, and they go from there.”
The military is developing using mass drones for defense as a “collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decisionmaking and adapting like swarms in nature,” William Roper, director of the Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office, said in a statement.
Romeo Durscher, director of education for consumer drone company DJI, says drones working in unison for search and rescues “will be tremendously helpful. What we have now is way better than what we had two years ago, but it’s still a lot of manual input,” he says.
“We know one single drone can reduce the time it takes to find someone — imagine if we had many drones working together and sharing information how much faster it would be.”