Collaborative Research: NRI: FND: Flying Swarm for Safe Human Interaction in Unstructured Environments

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

While flying robots are becoming commonplace, swarms of them have the potential to be useful in a wide variety of cases such as surveillance and informational displays. Currently, flying swarms of robots have difficulty interacting with humans due to two factors: their almost ubiquitous reliance on external sensing, such as GPS or motion-capture systems, and their inherent danger to humans due to their use of hazardous high-speed propellers. The project will address these two factors by designing and creating a novel swarm of over 200 flying robots that are safe to operate around people. They will use only on-board sensing to interact with each other and humans and can operate in a wide range of unstructured environments. The swarm capabilities will be demonstrated in two scenarios: autonomous 3D shape formation, where the swarm self-assembles a user-specified shape, and a second scenario where a human uses their hands to move the swarm into a desired shape. This project investigates aspects of flying UAVs and their control to allow the creation of large flying swarms that are not reliant on external positioning, can safely interact with humans, and where the swarm has infinite endurance. The UAV uses a novel single actuator design to enable the low-cost creation of the swarm, as well as facilitate lightweight UAVs for human safety. The UAVs employ an infrared transceiver on a rapidly spinning chassis to sense bearing, elevation, and distance to neighboring UAVs, as well as transmit data to them. They also have a time-of-flight range finder to sense passive objects nearby. This sensing will be used to control the position of the individuals with respect to their neighbors and to enable swarm behaviors controlled through natural human interaction. The endurance of the swarm is extended by having UAVs take turns participating in the swarm shape, and then fly back to the base station to recharge. This cycle of swarming and then charging is repeated and staggered amongst the swarm so there are always UAVs participating in the swarm behavior. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.