If you get too close to a pufferfish, this undersea creature will blow up like a balloon to scare you away.Ěý
Now, a team of engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder has âand it could make flying drones safer in the not-so-distant future.Ěý
PufferBot is the brainchild of graduate student Hooman Hedayati and his colleagues at the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder. Itâs a skittish machine: This hovering quadcopter drone comes complete with a plastic shield that can expand in size at a momentâs noticeâforming a robotic airbag that could prevent dangerous collisions between people and machines.
The researchers will present their results virtually Oct. 25 Ěýat the (IROS 2020). Think of it like introducing a bit of coral reef to the world of high-tech robotics.Ěý
âWe were trying to design a safer robot that could communicate safety information to the user,â Hedayati said. âWe started by looking at how animals do the same thing.â
Drones, he explained, are becoming a more ubiquitous part of our everyday lives, taking on tasks from inspecting bridges for cracks to delivering packages to your doorstep. But as these machines proliferate in homes and workplaces, safety will be more important than ever.Ěý
âIâve been working with drones for years, but whenever I go out and fly robots, I still feel not confident,â Hedayati said. âWhat happens if it falls on someone and hurts them? Technologies like PufferBot can help.â
CU Boulder team members on the project include Daniel Leithinger and Daniel Szafir, both assistant professors in ATLAS and the Department of Computer Science, and Ryo Suzuki, a former graduate student now at the University of Calgary.Ěý
Epic fails
Those kinds of accidents arenât just a future problem.
Just check out YouTube where videos of drone âfails,â from spectacular crashes to collisions with humans, abound. Those kinds of dangers, Hedayati said, could make many people (justifiably) wary about inviting robots into their homes.
âWeâve been told that robots are great and can do a lot of tasks,â he said. âBut where are these robots? Why are they not in our houses? Why do you see them inside cages in factories?â
Itâs that safety-first mindset that forms the bulk of the engineerâs research.Ěý
Hedayati and his colleagues have previously experimented with as they work side-by-side. Humans can don AR goggles, for example, to track the flight paths of drones in their vicinity. In one case, the team communicated that information to users by making the drone look like what Hedayati called âa giant, creepy eyeball.â
But what happens if those kinds of tools donât work? Enter PufferBot, the robot inspired by some of natureâs weirdest fish.
âImagine someone is walking closer to a robot, and thereâs no way for it to escape,â Hedayati said.
Search and rescue
In practice, PufferBot looks less like a fish and more like a Hoberman sphere, one of those expandable plastic balls that you can find at many toy stores. The robotâs âairbagâ is made out of hoops of plastic that are fastened to its top and can inflate from roughly 20 inches to 33 inches in diameter.
Under normal circumstances, the shield collapses and stays out of the way. But when danger is close, thatâs when PufferBot puffs up, extending those hoops over its four, spinning rotors to keep them away from people and obstacles.
âIt can act as a temporary cage,â Hedayati said. âIt also communicates with users to tell them: âDonât come close to me.ââĚý
The design works like a charm: The robotâs shield is able to sustain a wide range of potential collisions and weighs a little over a poundâlight enough that it wonât impede PufferBotâs flying.
Hedayati has high hopes for his teamâs invention. He imagines that, one day, a PufferBot-like robot could fly into a collapsed building to search for survivors, all while using its shield to avoid smashing into rubble.Ěý
As for real pufferfishâthose you still want to avoid.