Holy Copters! Smart Pixels Take to the Air
Stan Gibson | Date: 02-26-10 | Comments: 0
- What can you do with a fleet of tiny helicopters? Plenty, if the group is self-organizing and each copter carries a few LEDs.
What can you do with a fleet of tiny helicopters? Plenty, if
the group is self-organizing and each copter carries a few LEDs. Researchers at
MIT are working to transform that vision into reality in the “Flyfire” project.
“It’s like the smart dust concept.
We’re looking to make a small device pervasive as hardware and battery
technologies go smaller and smaller,” says E. Roon Kang, research fellow at
MIT. Work on Flyfire is under way at MIT's SENSEable
City Lab and Aerospace Robotics and
Embedded Systems Laboratory (ARES Lab).
“It's like when
Winnie the Pooh hits a beehive: A swarm of bees comes out and chases him while
changing its configuration to resemble a beast,” Kang relates. “In Flyfire,
each bee is essentially a pixel that emits colored light and reconfigures
itself into different forms.”
But lots of work will have to be done before that vision is
realized. At present, each helicopter is several inches tall and each LED
“pixel” is about the size of a quarter—with about a foot separating each LED
once they’re launched. MIT researchers have succeeded so far in getting a
handful to operate as a unit, Kang states.
Kang acknowledges there are technical challenges aplenty,
such as keeping the batteries charged, taking off, landing and controlling the
fleet from a central terminal. Nonetheless, the researchers aim to build a much
larger fleet of devices and command them to perform elaborate synchronized choreographies.
Using the self-stabilizing and precise controlling technology developed by the
ARES Lab, the motion of the pixels would create an ever-changing
three-dimensional display.
While fleets of unmanned robotic fliers have in the
past often been aimed at military applications, Kang says Flyfire is more
geared at present to nighttime public art displays. Kang says it’s too early to
estimate how much the flying devices would cost if mass-produced.
