Aerial Adapting Robots

The key to many applications is finding a way to teach robots how to adapt to the environment they work in. Where industrial robots have made their mark is doing tasks repeatably but the future is really doing their task un-repeatably but still accurately.  

Controlling a robot and asking it to go places in real-time accurately can be very tricky. As you know if you have talked with robotic manufacturers an industrial robot is known to be very repeatable but not accurate. 

You can ask a robot to go to the same point and it will hit the same point every time with great precision.  If you ask a robot to move 100mm from where it is, it will move that distance but with maybe 10x's less precision depending on how that particular robot was put together.  

Often the solution to compensate for this lies outside of the robot with a number of tricks and tools that go into building a system and controlling the process with various forms of feedback.

Below is a link to a great video showing how researchers from the University of Pennsylvania programmed flying robots to perform un-repeatable, agile or adaptive tasks!  Very impressive!

Autonomous Agile Aerial Robots