Formation Quadcopters Controlled by Hand Gestures

Screen Shot 2014-01-09 at 3.35.47 AM

Soon-Jo Chung’s group has produced from its research into swarms of autonomous flying spacecraft and unmanned aerial vehicles, aerial drones react to a student’s arm movements like an orchestra to a director’s prompts.

[T]the student wears gloves and/or a hat equipped with reflective markers the small quadcopters sense and to which they respond. The student moves one gloved arm and all 10 drones react, moving up and down or side to side.

When the student moves his left and right arms separately, two lines of five drones respond to their corresponding arm’s direction, independently of the other line. In another option, the automatically controlled quadrotors move as a unit to avoid the student as he walks through the spacecraft collection.

It’s like an evil genius version of the Wii or Xbox One…

Via Aerospace Engineering.

This entry was posted in Gadgets, Videos by . Bookmark the permalink.

About

I design video games for a living, write fiction, political theory and poetry for personal amusement, and train regularly in Western European 16th century swordwork. On frequent occasion I have been known to hunt for and explore abandoned graveyards, train tunnels and other interesting places wherever I may find them, but there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that I am preparing to set off a zombie apocalypse. Nothing that will stand up in court, at least. I use paranthesis with distressing frequency, have a deep passion for history, anthropology and sociological theory, and really, really, really hate mayonnaise. But I wash my hands after the writing. Promise.

Leave a Reply