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Flying robots ready for traffic inspection
As Peter Corke sees it, miniature, unmanned helicopters like the one pictured here, will soon become an everyday sight in Australia: monitoring traffic, conducting aerial mapping, inspecting bridges, taking a close look at the facades of high-rise buildings - and even inspecting lift-wells.
In fact the precision flying abilities of CSIRO's new Mantis unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are so good, that he believes it will take over many of the jobs handled by today's conventional aircraft. Dr Corke who headed the team that developed Mantis, says the aircraft is fully autonomous.
Its built-in computer brain allows its operator to tell the machine where to go and what to do - and the Mantis will take off, do the job and find its way back again unassisted. In other applications fleets of the 1.5 metre-long Mantises could comb the ocean as part of a sea rescue operation - and cover many square kilometres faster than a small manned aircraft could do.
"Mantis overcomes many machine intelligence and cost issues, which have prevented the development of small, almost disposable unmanned air vehicles," Dr Corke said. "It was also our aim to develop an inexpensive system where the cost of the electronics, now mostly almost ten times more expensive than the helicopter, would instead be about the same price".
"The major task in developing Mantis was to produce an inertial sensing system and a computer vision system to control and provide flight stability and to guide the aircraft."
Dr Corke said the inertial sensing system behaved somewhat like an inner ear, providing balance and indicating the orientation of the helicopter in the air. The instrument, custom developed by CSIRO uses low-cost MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) sensors and is fabricated from magnesium alloy. It weighs only 75 g.
"This is much lighter than current technology and is one of the major reasons we were able to make the brains of the Mantis light enough to be carried by such a small helicopter," he said.
