The DARPA researchers have come up with autonomous drones which can have huge impacts on search and rescue operations during natural calamities such as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes.
For those of you who may not be very well aware of the topics of drones please see the video below. Drones or the commercially available quadcopters are the smallish flying electronic set of devices which can seem like tiny helicopter-like things and have huge applications. Their users range from hobbyists in the backyard to governmental agencies.
These drones typically have four rotor-blades which propel them and are arranged in a diamond or rhombus shape. The drones fundamentally consist of a battery to power the drone, a set of blades/propellers which are controlled by motors and a flight system which acts as the brain which tells the drones what to do and how to fly.
The challenge which the scientists at DARPA were posed was that suppose the drone neither has access to the GPS signals (using which we use facilities such as Google Maps, Bing Maps etc. ) nor does the drone have access to any Radio Frequency link (i.e. no human or machine can control the drone's flight remotely) can the drone fly properly and conduct a task.
The team of drone-scientists came up with a fantastic result as a part of the Flight Lightweight Autonomy Phase 2 Testing. This was the part of the program as a result of which they came up with the amazing self-flying drone.
The scientists have designed an amazing self-flying drone with sophisticated algorithms for perception, stereo-visual odometry and much more. These self-flying drones can fly autonomously without the support of any GPS or external Radio Frequency control and can be leveraged efficiently as not just flying scouts but also during the search and rescue operations conducted during natural calamities such as earthquakes, floods etc.
These drones can principally perform three types of operations fly as fast as possible, go into urban settings and create semantic maps (which means rather than just creating a regular map they can understand that there is a road and there are three vehicles parked on it and not three small buildings) and these can also go in small aperture areas.
This opens up horizons not just for search and rescue operations but also for conducting a structural analysis. Suppose that a team of engineers or rescue workers want to find out that whether a location or a building is safe to go in. This might just be because that location/building is old or the structure is in a dilapidated condition. Even for such a situation, these self-flying drones can turn out to be a great strategic help.
Thus the team of researchers and scientists at DARPA claimed that whereas in the case of the conventional remotely controlled drones (via Radio Frequncy remote control) a search and rescue team would always be in need of good drone pilots, with DARPA's self-flying drones or their software on board the drones, the search and rescue teams would have a great blessing with them of having an autonomous drone without the necessity of good drone pilots.
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