Quote:
Originally Posted by Omaroo
What I'd like answered is a question regarding how they navigate. It's all easy to fly a remote copter by remote control and make it go left, right, forward, back, up and down - but making them literally snap to a point in 3D space is incredible. Even more so is making several snap to points adjacent within that 3D space. How do they know where they are from millisecond to millisecond in relation to the ground and each other? They have to navigate, otherwise they'd never be able to accurately fly in any sort of formation. I'd hard a guess and say it's controlled optically, and I also guess that they say it somewhere on the site. Mebbe I should stop right here and go and have a look...  |
There is no doubt that the whole flock of units is driven by a central computer. If you look around the rim of the room ceiling you'll see two rows of IR cameras. Same model used in motion capture volumes. I suspect each unit has a marker that is accurately located within the volume. Because of the multitude of cameras in the array there is always a line of sight and an accurate position measurement. The rest is just realtime sync executed many frames per second by a MOCAP software of sort.
EDIT: there 4 markers per unit. They are located close to the propellers on each arms. Little reflective white balls. Makes sense to have at least 3 so they map the unit plane in 3D and take orientation into account. 4 is for balance I guess.