The smart-flying robot

An autonomous flying robot that is as smart as a bird when it comes to manoeuvring around obstacles has been developed by an Indian-origin scientist and his colleagues.

Able to guide itself through forests, tunnels or damaged buildings, the machine could have tremendous value in search-and-rescue operations, researchers say.

Small flying machines are already common, and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology provides guidance. Now, Ashutosh Saxena from Cornell University and his team are tackling the hard part: how to keep the vehicle from slamming into walls and tree branches.

Human controllers can't always react swiftly enough, and radio signals may not reach everywhere the robot goes.

The test vehicle is a quadrotor, a commercially available flying machine about the size of a card table with four helicopter rotors.

Saxena and his team have already programmed quadrotors to navigate hallways and stairwells using 3-D cameras. But in the wild, these cameras aren't accurate enough at large distances to plan a route around obstacles.

So, Saxena is building on methods he previously developed to turn a flat video camera image into a 3-D model of the environment using such cues as converging straight lines, the apparent size of familiar objects and what objects are in front of or behind each other - the same cues humans unconsciously use to supplement their stereoscopic vision.

Researchers trained the robot with 3-D pictures of such obstacles as tree branches, poles, fences and buildings; the robot's computer learns the characteristics all the images have in common, such as colour, shape, texture and context – a branch, for example, is attached to a tree.

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