MIT Researcher Develops iPhone App to Easily Control Swarms of Aerial Drones

Flying UAVs might someday become as easy as fiddling with your phone

By Jeremy Hsu Posted 04.05.2010 at 4:57 pm 3 Comments

iPhone Drone Simplify, simplify MIT

Fleets of unmanned drones have become a common weapon in the U.S. military's arsenal, but clunky controls and interfaces that distract human operators can lead to costly mistakes and crashes. Such problems prompted a former U.S. Navy pilot to develop an iPhone app that allows any smartphone user to learn how to fly an unmanned aerial system in just three minutes.

Easier control interfaces could drastically cut down on training time and costs, not to mention mistakes. Consider that current military pilots undergo thousands of hours of training to learn how to fly drones.

"This is all about the mission -- you just need more information from an image, and you shouldn't have to spend $1 million to train someone to get that picture," said Mary "Missy" Cummings, an MIT aerospace and systems engineer.

Cummings once flew F-18 Hornets for the U.S. Navy, and saw fellow fighter pilots die in aircraft carrier landing mishaps. Since then, she has devoted her research at MIT's Humans and Automation Laboratory (HAL) toward making it easier to fly drones and interact with technology.

That means less time spent fiddling with menus or trying to zoom a camera, and more time focused on the task at hand -- whether that involves trying to I.D. a sniper or search for victims after a natural disaster.

The HAL group recently ran experiments where participants controlled a drone via smartphone so that they could read an eye chart and find a photo within a building. Cummings and her students hope to eventually test the app in the real world and fly the drone up to 500 feet.

[MIT]

Previous Article: Process That Converts Cotton to Boron Carbide Could Create Armored T-Shirts

Next Article: NYPD And NYFD Super Boats To Replace Half-Century-Old Clunkers Patrolling New York Harbor

3 Comments

Link to this comment

ford2go

04/06/10 at 3:06 am

C'mon, go easy on the titles. This is a veeeeery preliminary effort that shows some promise. It's light years away from controlling one UAV -- much less swarms.

The 3 minute training claim is just over the top.

And the iPhone is just a convenient test device. Hard to say what will be used if/when this goes anywhere.

Link to this comment

AreYouKidding

04/06/10 at 7:36 am

X2 ford2go, the article specifically says it controls ONE drone......who comes up with the titles?

Link to this comment

trireme

04/06/10 at 1:08 pm

It helps that this is a slow-moving, hovering drone. It takes very little practice to fly what is essentially an RC helicopter. And without a demonstration of more conventional controls, I don't see how this setup saves you any time or prevents distractions.

All the same, I would love to have this app and a small UAV to play with. They have at least invented a great toy!

Popular Tags

Technology

All Tags All Photos All Videos

Technology

+ More Photo Galleries

June 2013: American Energy Independence

Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.