NO, I insist, after you. That awkward moment in the street is something drones can now share with us, thanks to an update to their navigation systems.
Parker Conroy and his team at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City have designed a collision-avoidance system that allows quadcopter drones to “see” each other and take steps to avoid crashing in mid-air. Cameras detect patterns on an oncoming quadcopter and the size of these in pixels indicates the distance between them. The rate of change of this value indicates relative velocity. An off-board computer then calculates the area within which a collision could occur and tells the drone to take evasive action (arxiv.org/abs/1411.3794).
Sometimes, however, the drones misjudge the trajectory of their partner and dodge in the same direction. They automatically correct their paths, but for a moment they are engaged in a human-like “reciprocal dance”.
“It’s not often you see robots dancing on their own,” says Conroy, who now works for robot manufacturer Adept Technology. Mirko Kovac at Imperial College London’s new centre for flying robots says it’s vital that drones in the future have these kind of built-in “instincts”.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Drones do awkward dance to avoid crashing”
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