Meet the dazzling flying machines of the future | Raffaello D'Andrea
When you hear the word "drone," you probably think of something either very useful or very scary. But could they have aesthetic value? Autonomous systems expert Raffaello D'Andrea develops...
========== What started as a platform for hobbyists is poised to become
a multibillion-dollar industry. Inspection, environmental monitoring,
photography and film and journalism: these are some of the potential
applications for commercial drones, and their enablers
are the capabilities being developed at research facilities around the world. For example, before aerial
package delivery entered our social consciousness, an autonomous fleet of flying machines
built a six-meter-tall tower composed of 1,500 bricks in front of a live audience
at the FRAC Centre in France, and several years ago,
they started to fly with ropes. By tethering flying machines, they can achieve high speeds
and accelerations in very tight spaces. They can also autonomously build
tensile structu...