The Internet is full of videos, where flocks of drones fly beautifully and smoothly, simultaneously performing various tricks. So what? They in fact rely on the data received on GPS, but what to do, when any GPS can not be used? Engineers of the University of Pennsylvania teach drones to do without them.
To do this, they took twelve small quadrocopters weighing 250 grams, equipped each with a set for aircraft created by Qualcomm Snapdragon. Each such unit is equipped with a microcomputer based on a quad-core processor and includes a VGA camera with a viewing angle of 160 degrees, two VGA-cameras operating in pairs, and a 4K-camera required for capturing beautiful videos.
The coupled cameras allow the drone to track other objects, determining which way they are moving. The disadvantage was that with increasing distance, the on-board PC did not correctly calculate the distance to objects, but the developers managed to eliminate the problem - now at a distance of up to a hundred meters the device calculates the distance with an error of up to half a meter.
Due to this, the drones moving in a flock do not collide at all, they keep the distance and the formation well even under difficult conditions. This was shown by the results of tests, in which the drones had to fly and orient themselves outside the premises in windy, cloudy weather.
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