Microdrones That Cooperate to Transport Objects Could Be Future of Warehouse Automation

Last month, we wrote about autonomous quadrotors from the University of Pennsylvania that use just a VGA camera and an IMU to navigate together in swarms. Without relying on external localization or GPS, quadrotors like these have much more potential to be real-world useful, since they can operate without expensive and complex infrastructure, even indoors. One potential application for drones like these is disaster operations, but honestly, that's just what everyone says when you ask them how their mobile robot could potentially be useful. What's much more interesting to us are commercial applications, and with drones, that inevitably means talking about delivery. There are a lot of reasons why we're skeptical about most commercial delivery drones, but that doesn't meant that the idea of using drones to move things from place to place isn't a good one. Vijay Kumar's lab at UPenn has been working on using their GPS-independent quadrotors for transporting payloads, and they're doing it collaboratively--the idea is that objects that are too large or heavy for one quadrotor to move can instead be moved by multiple quadrotors working together, and ultimately, they could be the best way to move items around a warehouse.