FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Autonomous Landing Quadcopters Are Becoming A Reality

Small-scale UAVs will soon be armed and have the ability to land autonomously.

Imagine Humvees equipped with small landing pads for armed quadcopters sent to attack targets, then autonomously return and land safely, all while the car is in motion, no less.

With Humvees already set to have lasers to protect infantrymen against the weaponized UAVs of the future, adding more drones to the mix doesn't seem like an outlandish idea—especially when Canadian researchers at McGill University in Montreal are developing new software for UAVs to autonomously land.

Advertisement

What you're seeing above appears to be the early stages of this drone software, being demonstrated at the lab level.

In March, the McGill Daily, a student run newspaper at the university, unearthed documents showing the university participating in over a million dollars in research helping the Canadian Department of National Defence to develop software for quadcopters in combat operations. (The research caused a minor controversy on campus when students protested to "Demilitarize McGill" and blockaded the drone research labs.)

According to the Daily, the professor heading up the project, Inna Sharf, is a mechanical engineer at the school's Aerospace Mechatronics Laboratory. Sharf's team has been tasked with a new project to create autonomous landing drone software.

As the moving platform grinds across, a UAV goes airborne and finds its landing pad simultaneously, without appearing to be controlled by a joystick. It's impressive stuff, and the McGill researchers aren't the only Canadian engineers to come up with the idea of autonomous docking drones.

In 2013, over at the Waterloo Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory (WAVELab) in Kitchener, Ontario, researchers paired a Clearpath Robotic's Husky ground drone with an Aeryon Labs (one of the leading Canadian drone companies) quadcopter to demonstrate fully autonomous docking.

According to Robohub, the problem with smaller UAVs is their short battery life and inability to carry a large payload. Pairing them with an unmanned ground vehicle like the Husky to recharge the quadcopter in the field is a possible future application.

We do know smaller, weaponized UAVs are in the cards. Some companies have even started the process of creating training prototypes of new battlefield threats involving smaller, weaponized drones.

In fact, you can already stare into the future of the type of drone that might one day grace the landing platforms of UGVs or Humvees, reloading and re-powering, to fight with next generation armies. Clunky as it looks, I saw this training prototype by Meggit at CANSEC: