Drones and robots are going to do many things for us in the future. As the below video, posted by Federico Augugliaro, shows, they could be used to build rope bridges. The video shows quadrocopters autonomously assembling a rope bridge that can support the crossing of a person. The bridge spans 7.4 meters between two scaffolding structures and has nine segments. It is made of Dyneema.
Here is how these tiny drones pulled this off:
The assembly of the bridge is performed by small custom quadrocopters and builds upon the Flying Machine Arena, a research and demonstration platform for aerial robotics. The arena is equipped with a motion capture system that provides vehicle position and attitude measurements. Algorithms are run on a computer and commands are then sent to the flying machines via a customized wireless infrastructure.
More information is available at the link below.
[Credit: Federico Augugliaro, Ammar Mirjan, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler, and Raffaello D’Andrea]
