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Tech

New Drones Seek Each Other Out, Snap Together to Form 'Colonies'

Flying robots achieve self-assembly.

It's not enough for engineers to design drones that can swarm together: Now they're making drones that actively seek each other out to form flying interconnected "colonies."

A project of Switzerland's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, it's called a "Distributed Flight Array," and it's exactly what it sounds like: A single, hexagonal drone, or single module can't do much besides roll around on the floor (using tiny, plastic wheels) and flop around a couple inches off the ground. But when the individual modules join together, they're a force to be reckoned with: "The individual vehicles of the Distributed Flight Array have fixed propellers that can lift them into the air, but the resulting flight is erratic and uncontrolled," the team says. "Joined together, however, these relatively simple modules evolve into a sophisticated multi-propeller system capable of coordinated flight."

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The coolest part of the whole thing is the drones don't need a human to snap them together, they do that autonomously. If you put several of the single-rotored drones in a  room together, they will roll around on the ground seeking each other out, eventually snapping together magnetically.

According to Raymond Oung, one of the engineers working on the project, there's no limit to how many modules can fit together, but currently, the individual modules will snap together in a random fashion. For now, they can only assemble on the ground, but the team is trying to figure out how to make in-flight reconfiguration work.

"They could be programmed to seek a certain pattern, but currently they are not," he said.

The project has been in development since the fall of 2008, but the team has just recently developed working prototypes. Once in flight, the modules coordinate with each other—individual rotors will spin faster or slower depending on how they are aligned in order to keep the colony level. If, for some reason, one module falls off or can't pull its weight, the others will make up the difference.

"Vehicles exchange information and combine this information with their own sensor measurements to determine how much thrust is needed for the array to take-off and maintain level flight," the team says. "If the array’s leveled flight is disturbed, each vehicle individually determines the amount of thrust required to correct for the disturbance based on its position in the array and the array’s motion."

It's just another tiny step toward robots that don't need us. And you know what comes after that.