A group of quadrocopters has successfully built a bridge from spools of rope that is strong enough for a human to walk on. This was captured in a video posted Friday by the researchers at the ETH Zurich Flying Machine Arena in Switzerland.
What is particularly awesome about the drone's achievement is that the the full-scale load-bearing bridge was built autonomously or without any human operator controlling the process. This supposedly signals another milestone in construction field, one that use aerial robotics or flying machines.
ETH Zurich Flying Machine Arena built a wireless infrastructure that is equipped with motion capture system that serves as the basis for vehicle positioning and attitude measurements, according to Robohub.
The system is then controlled by an offboard computer equipped with an algorithm that controls the flying machine according to the measurements, schematics and other relevant data uploaded.
The researchers has used the drones to build the bridge in a wider goal of investigating and developing methods for robotic aerial construction. They argued that drones are particularly useful because they can reach any point in space as well as fly in or around existing objects, in a paper published online.
The video presented only act as a demonstrator since the project is the first attempt at showing airborne drones building load bearing structures in full scale, Engadget reported.
The completed rope bridge is composed of several elements such as knots, links and braid, ETH Zurich said.
