Swarms of Drones for Forestry

 Recal my previous mentioning the use of drones in Forestry, with the potential of advanced sensors and cooperation with mapping and multitasking activity.  We did that with photography and later with Satellite images and helicopters.   Drone use makes sense.     Some evidence of advanced uses: 

Chinese scientists have proven that aerial robots can work together, navigate obstacles and, perhaps worryingly, track humans out of sight

By Sarah Knapton,  SCIENCE EDITOR

Drone swarms that dart nimbly around obstacles, mapping their surroundings or searching for fugitives, have long been the stuff of science fiction.

But now Chinese scientists have proven that aerial robots can work together, manoeuvring at speed through a dense bamboo forest without crashing into the plants or themselves.

In new footage, released by a team from Zhejiang University, a swarm of 10 lightweight drones was filmed moving gracefully through the gaps between trunks, successfully navigating uneven ground, weeds and tangled branches.  ... '

Swarm Robotics

The power of the swarm?  Collective application to a task?  Sharing tasks. Data and path aware solutions? 

Researchers Successfully Build Four-Legged Swarm Robots  By University of Notre Dame News, October 20, 2021

The University of Notre Dame's Yasemin Ozkan-Aydin constructed four-legged swarm robots capable of traversing rough terrain and performing complex tasks collectively.

For a study co-authored with the Georgia Institute of Technology's Daniel I. Goldman, Ozkan-Aydin theorized that physically linking individual robots could augment their collective mobility and help them overcome challenges.

She three-dimensionally-printed the robots, each incorporating a lithium polymer battery, a microcontroller, a front light sensor, and two magnetic touch sensors so the robots could link up.

When an individual robot got stuck, it emitted a signal to other robots, which connected with it to provide support and overcome obstacles while operating as one.

From University of Notre Dame News    View Full Article  

Combat Drones Catching Rides

 Saw this demonstrated in simulated concept, expect to see more swarm and group applications.

DARPA's New Combat Drones Could Catch a Ride from Other Aircraft   By Popular Science  February 23, 2021

Imagine an unmanned aircraft that is able to launch its own air-to-air weapon. That agile machine would itself first deploy from a bigger, crewed airplane, meaning that the entire system would involve missiles inside a drone that detaches from an airplane—like airborne Russian nesting dolls. This is the idea behind the aptly-named LongShot project, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced last week.

Details about the project are scant, but here's what we know about it.

DARPA said in a news release that the purpose was to create a new craft "that can significantly extend engagement ranges, increase mission effectiveness, and reduce the risk to manned aircraft."

In other words, the system is a type of "standoff" weapon—just like a B-52 bomber deploying a cruise missile while flying outside an adversary's airspace, it's an approach that keeps an aircraft and its crew far away from enemy air defenses.... 

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency last week announced the LongShot project to develop an unmanned aircraft able to launch its own air-to-air weapon ....

Credit: Senior Airman Haley Stevens /U.S. Air Force

From Popular Science

Swarm Robotics

 A space we touched on very early ... even before many robots were involved!  But you could see the sensors and 'actors' were needed very quickly.  Had an element of crowdsourcing to it too. Think goals tasks and data gathering.  And how humans interact with the swarm. 

Swarm Robotics: Projects, New Business Models & Technical Challenges

How to improve the scalability of Swarm robotics applications, Collective AI algorithms and hardware limits

By Alexandre Gonfalonieri  in TowardsDataScience

Swarm robotics is a promising recent researching area inspired by swarm intelligence and robotics. The objective is to control a large number of simple robots to solve complex tasks.

Despite the growing number of research papers, scalable applications are still far away, and new business models still need to be found in the context of a Machine-to-Machine economy (M2M).

Recently, I had the chance to collaborate with a team involved with swarm robotics. The goal was to leverage a group of small robots to identify water leaks in a large-scale facility.

Robot Swarming Satellites

Recall our interest in swarming cooperating solutions here.

Robot Satellite Swarms Increase Communication Possibilities,  By ZDNet, February 11, 2021 in ACM

Carnegie Mellon University researchers prepare CubeSats for space. 

A National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission now underway is an experiment to maximize the effectiveness of CubeSats.  A U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission currently underway aims to maximize the effectiveness of CubeSats—tiny, cost-effective satellites—by showing how they could track and communicate with each other.

The V-R3x mission will test three CubeSats and the underlying technologies that could pave the way for autonomous swarming satellites.  Said Carnegie Mellon University's Zac Manchester, "This mission is a precursor to more advanced swarming capabilities and autonomous formation flying."

Swarms of satellites, potentially numbering in the thousands and working cooperatively, could be used for communications, imaging, and forecasting tasks.  Manchester added, "The satellites will wake up and do their thing autonomously. We mainly need to make sure that we get their data downloaded." ... '

The Army and Swarming Drones

Expect the use of multiple drones that work together to achieve results to comtine to increase.   And Military is an obvious application.  Note the use of (HRL) Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning) as being tested,will take a look at the details of that.

Army Advances Learning Capabilities of Drone Swarms   By U.S. Army Research Laboratory

U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory researchers, working with colleagues a North Carolina State and Oklahoma State universities, have developed a reinforcement learning technique to guide swarms of unmanned drones on missions.

Researchers at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and North Carolina State and Oklahoma State universities developed a reinforcement learning technique to enable swarms of unmanned drones to carry out missions while minimizing performance uncertainty.

The Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) approach breaks down a global control objective into hierarchies, including multiple small group-level microscopic control and broad swarm-level macroscopic control.

Each hierarchy exhibits a unique learning loop with its own local and global reward functions, and running these loops in parallel significantly compresses learning time.

Compared to centralized reinforcement learning, HRL shortened learning time by the swarm by 80%, and limited loss of optimality (the point at which the difference between benefits and costs is maximized) to 5%.

From U.S. Army Research Laboratory
More at the link.

Swarming Defense Drones

Drones by their more flexible nature are creating new options with different kinds of precision, scale and application.   Here a Defense example.

DARPA is testing drones it can launch from a plane—then collect mid-air in MIT Technology Review

The news: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has conducted the first test of a new type of drone that can be launched from a plane in a swarm then recovered in mid-air when it's done its job.

How it works: A military transport or bomber plane releases a series of drones in rapid succession, they carry out the task designated to them (surveillance, for example), then they return to the plane, docking on a line before being winched in. It looks a bit like the airborne refueling process.  ... "

Swarms of Drones Herding Sheep

Whats most interesting here is the use of swarms of multiple drones performing a group task.   Which is what we tested , but not sheepor dogs,  Or does it?  I quote from the full artcle:  " ... A single drone can do the job of multiple dogs, farmers say. ... " .  But I assume you could look for tasks or subtasks that might be done in parallel. 

Mavic 2 drones New Zealand Farmers Have New Tool for Herding Sheep: Drones That Bark Like Dogs    in The Washington Post  By Peter Holley

 

New Zealand farmers are using drones to herd livestock, with some capable of emitting barks like dogs. One drone, the DJI Mavic Enterprise, can record sounds and play them over a loudspeaker, allowing the machine to mimic its canine counterparts. Shepherd Corey Lambeth said cows are less resistant to drones than to actual dogs, which means the machines move livestock faster, with less stress. The drones also let farmers monitor their land remotely, tracking water and feed levels, and checking on livestock health without upsetting the animals. Said farmer Jason Rentoul, "Being a hilly farm where a lot of stuff is done on foot, the drones really saved a lot of man-hours. The drone does the higher bits that you can't see [from the ground], and you would [otherwise] have to walk half an hour to go and have a look and then go, 'Oh, there was no sheep there.'"... '

Use of Cube Satellites

Recent mention of the successful use of Cube Satellites made me think of yet broader applications, and others are thinking this way.  Back to the swarms of small and relatively cheap robots  to perform tasks as a group.   Could such small devices be very cheaply launched in groups?  See:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CubeSat   And the recent use of Cube Sats for the recent  Mars Lander.

Tiny satellites could be “guide stars” for huge next-generation telescopes
Researchers design CubeSats with lasers to provide steady reference light for telescopes investigating distant planets.    By Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office 

There are more than 3,900 confirmed planets beyond our solar system. Most of them have been detected because of their “transits” — instances when a planet crosses its star, momentarily blocking its light. These dips in starlight can tell astronomers a bit about a planet’s size and its distance from its star.

But knowing more about the planet, including whether it harbors oxygen, water, and other signs of life, requires far more powerful tools. Ideally, these would be much bigger telescopes in space, with light-gathering mirrors as wide as those of the largest ground observatories. NASA engineers are now developing designs for such next-generation space telescopes, including “segmented” telescopes with multiple small mirrors that could be assembled or unfurled to form one very large telescope once launched into space. ... " 

Potential of Drone Swarms

We examined, and here Wired debunks their current capabilities.  Teleoperation is not an autonomous swarm.  But if cars can be autonomous, how soon can swarms?

Drone Swarms as you Know them are Just An Illusion - For now.   By Liam Cobb in Wired

" ... It’s an evocative word, swarms, and innocuous enough when applied to one of Intel’s drone light shows. But it’s tinged with alarm—if drones can dance at twilight, they can also attack. Sure enough, a gang outside Denver sent a small fleet to harass FBI agents on a raid earlier this year. In Syria, rebels reportedly sicced a squadron of quadrotors on a Russian base. To the media, both events were swarms.... 

Take comfort, then, in this buzzkill: “The swarm is really an illusion,” says Mac Schwager, an assistant professor at Stanford who studies multi­robot systems. Schwager, along with many of his colleagues, resists the word. Too entomological, conjuring as it does frillions of bugs surging as a single superorganism through the air. (Flocking birds, in fact, were the field’s original inspiration—though the occasional roboticist does try studying insects.) When drones “swarm,” on the other hand, they’ve been choreographed in advance, or else are being controlled by human minders with joysticks. Even the DOD’s recent military demos have required teleoperators. ... "

Swarming Autonomous Drones

I have mentioned a number of times our proposal for swarms in places like yards and warehouses.  Both drones and rolling robots.  We were ahead of our time, but there were few of the navigation capabilities in place yet.   Yet we understood the requirements and how a 'swarm' in particular would address them.

Autonomous and Cooperating: The Dawn of the Drone Swarm
COSMOS   By Andrew Masterson

The Hungarian Academy of Science has demonstrated a method to induce real-world self-organizing flocking behavior in robot drones. The Academy's Gabor Vasarhelyi says distributed flocking algorithms had been limited in real-world applications because their underlying theoretical models cannot account for "constrained motion and communication capabilities, delays, perturbations, or the presence of barriers." Vasarhelyi's team developed models that included additional factors to reflect unpredictable real-world impediments, such as obstacles and boundaries encountered while moving at high velocities, as well as the sudden malfunction of sensors and short-range communication equipment. Evolutionary optimization was applied to the flocking model, which was tested using 30 autonomous aerial drones operating in a setting filled with obstacles while their electronics were programmed to fail unexpectedly. After a few runs, the drone swarm flocked and flew without difficulty, especially at high velocities.   ... "

Drone Swarms Hard to Stop

As one might expect, the additional complexity makes it difficult/

Think One Military Drone is Bad? Drone Swarms Are Terrifyingly Difficult to Stop ... "   By Joel Hruska in Extremetech

Saving Lives with Swarms of Drones

Self assembling and autonomous drones for safety and rescue platforms.

Saving Lives with Aerial Drones in CACM

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania General Robotics, Automation, Sensing & Perception Laboratory have created a system of aerial drones that can connect to form rigid structures for emergency rescues. .... " 

Laser Power Insect Robotics

Having very small flying robots that can be tasked to jobs, alone or in groups,  will change many things.  We examined how tasks and services might be solved by such methods.  There continue to be updates.

Laser-Powered Robot Insect Achieves Lift Off
Everything is better with lasers, especially tiny robot insects    By Evan Ackerman

For robots of all sizes, power is a fundamental problem. Any robot that moves is constrained in one way or another by power supply, whether it’s relying on carrying around heavy batteries, combustion engines, fuel cells, or anything else. It’s particularly tricky to manage power as your robot gets smaller, since it’s much more straightforward to scale these things up rather than down—and for really tiny robots (with masses in the hundreds of milligrams range), especially those that demand a lot of power, there really isn’t a good solution. In practice, this means that on the scale of small insects robots often depend on tethers for power, which isn’t ideal for making them practical in the long term.

At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Brisbane, Australia, next week, roboticists from the University of Washington, in Seattle, will present RoboFly, a laser-powered insect-sized flapping wing robot that performs the first (very brief) untethered flight of a robot at such a small scale. ...  "

Multi Robotic Systems

They open the door to all sorts of collaborative displays and tasks.

Drone Light Shows Look Cool, but How Do They Work?    By PC Magazine in CACM

Scientists are exploring multi-robot systems technology, with University of Southern California professor Nora Ayanian noting her research involves developing "distributed planning and control foundations that are broadly applicable across all aspects of multi-robot systems or mobile sensor networks."

Ayanian's work concentrates on end-to-end solutions for multirobot coordination, which start from high-level specifications and deliver code for individual units in the system.

Meanwhile, Oregon State University's Shauharda Khadka has developed autonomous units that have learned to navigate an environment to track rewards that shift location rapidly and unpredictably. Khadka says his robot swarm learned to explore its environment to track the reward, exploit the reward when it locates the reward, and resumes exploration when its location changed.

Also making strides is the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Michael W. Otte, whose algorithm taps distributed systems, graph theory, probability theory, and auctions to enable robot teams to pool resources and split up tasks to solve common problems. ... "

Drone Swarms Don't Need a Break

Powerful, yet also scary scenario.    At least now they run out of power.  Note the solution here is in the process of using a swarm this way by collaborating.   The realm of our original research.

Energy Neutral Drone Swarms Can Spy on You Without Taking a Break   in Motherboard by Michael Byrne

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and Koc University in Turkey propose an Energy Neutral Internet of Drones (enIoD) as a swarm of aerial surveillance robots that operates continuously because charging and data transfer tasks are integrated nearly seamlessly into its function. They note the enIoD would use a hybrid energy harvesting system that does not tap the power grid, with each drone equipped with a solar cell or wind turbine, while the drones themselves serve as the grid connecting each charging station. The researchers also say wireless power transfer systems combined with wireless charging docks distributed across a wide area would enable the drone swarm to fly more or less without interruption. The team says the purpose of this network is to keep track of amateur drones, which they see as a vector for terrorists and other malefactors to attack civilians.  .... " 

Drone Swarms Flying without GPS

Brought up in a recent challenge for Drone Swarms and Drones indoors.

This Autonomous Quadrotor Swarm Doesn't Need GPS    By Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum

UPenn's autonomous quadrotor swarm doesn't need GPS or external localization to fly indoors or outdoors. .... "

DARPA Does Gremlin Swarms

We saw proposals in this space when we examined the use of cooperative swarming in places like warehouses,  some time ago.  Now Gremlins, small drones,  can be dropped from planes and retrieved.    Don't think the big idea here is the retrieving, its the swarming.   In Breakingdefense: 

" ... General Atomics’ secret weapon isn’t the drone. It’s the mechanical arm that catches it in mid-flight — and then hauls it into the back of a C-130 cargo plane, also in mid-flight.

General Atomics, which builds the iconic Predator, has rolled out its offering for DARPA’s Gremlins program, blandly called the Small Unmanned Air Vehicle (SUAS). The goal: Build drones — and equally critical, a launch and recovery system — that can take off from a manned aircraft, conduct a mission and come back aboard the plane.

Getting the drone back is “the DARPA-hard part,” said Chris Pehrson, General Atomics VP for Strategic Development in an interview at the Air Force Association conference here last week. GA’s solution blends sophisticated software with cartoony mechanics, as if their senior engineer were Wiley E. Coyote.   .... "  

Swarming Robotics

More Swarms.  Now how do we get the cooperation right?  With centralized control.

Introducing a New Robotic Class With Abilities Out-Performing Existing Machines or Even Biological Organisms   CORDIS News

The European Union-funded E-SWARM project has yielded the first self-assembling multi-robot system that exhibits sensorimotor coordination equivalent to that seen in monolithic robots. The E-SWARM researchers say their system can adjust its organization, autonomously cohering into shapes and sizes based on the task or environment. The project makes use of units linked via a mergeable nervous system (MNS), which includes a centralized decision-making unit called the "brain unit." The robots self-reconfigure by absorbing units of different capabilities into their gestalt body, forming larger clusters with a single centralized controller. The MNS robots also can divide into separate bodies with independent brain units, and self-repair by eliminating or replacing malfunctioning body parts, including a malfunctioning brain unit. The researchers note the system is designed to be scalable, both in terms of computational resources for robotic control and response time to stimuli. The team says MNS robots likely will be designed to adapt to changing task requirements. .... " 

Swarms in Control

A favorite topic.  All systems are controlled by multiple entities.   Call that a swarm.   Stanford and their Platform Lab developing infrastructure for such systems.   Call it 'Big Control'.

Who Will Control the Swarm? 
A team of computer scientists and engineers are developing the infrastructure to centrally manage autonomous cars and drones ...
Stanford News   by Andrew Myers

Researchers at Stanford University believe future device swarms will operate via centralized management, using applications running in large data centers, similar to the way the cloud centralizes big data. In order to achieve this goal, the Stanford team has established the Platform Lab to develop infrastructure for these new "Big Control" applications. Although most current research into autonomous vehicles assumes a distributed model controlled in a peer-to-peer manner, with each machine doing its own calculations, a more concentrated model would have significant advantages, says Platform Lab faculty director John Ousterhout, who received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for 1987, and the ACM Software System Award for 1997. Ousterhout notes this more concentrated model would provide a big-picture view of the world that enables better control of higher-level tasks such as system-wide situational perception, decision-making, and large-scale traffic planning. In addition, Ousterhout says the centralized applications can utilize powerful machine-learning algorithms that let the control systems learn and improve their behavior. The researchers are outlining a roadmap of the platform architecture. .... "