We saw recently a drone that is able to glide like a plane towards its destination and land itself on a special platform it can detect. Well, how about a drone that can land on a moving vehicle now?
According to a Robohub report, a team of engineers from the University of Waterloo put up a control system that enables a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), or drone, to safely land on an UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) without the help of a human coordinator.
The two vehicles communicate their position constantly and converge to a common location to dock successfully as you will see in the video bellow.
Why is this useful? Drones are currently limited by their batteries, meaning their range is not that great for an ample reconnaissance mission for example. So, an unmanned vehicle could carry the drone near the hot zone, then it will do it’s job and safely reunite with the carrier to get back to the base.
The video shows that the system works both indoors and outside, where the wind factor comes to equation. It doesn’t look that impressive, but then remember that this is probably the first autonomous duo that can perform such a complex maneuver.
Let’s hope they won’t be used in the future to land on your car and give you a surprise ticket for running that yellow light a couple intersections back. That new tech involving all vehicles communicating with each other suddenly doesn’t sound that good.
Google News