Can drones paint? The Budapest-based company CollMot Robotics certainly thinks so. It lets artists use drones as “sky brushes”, creating lines of light that all come together as 3D “sky paintings” when captured in long-exposure photos such as this one.
The company organises live light shows, in which swarms of drones equipped with coloured lights can be watched from hundreds of metres away. The drones are pre-programmed to follow a particular pathway, but backed up for safety with flocking technology that lets them inform each other of unexpected events, and avoid collisions. If the battery of one drone runs low, for instance, it can automatically signal the issue to the others, and the swarm will get back home safely without colliding.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. “The project, back in 2009, was a biological one based on how collective decisions are made in the animal kingdom,” says CollMot’s founder, Gabor Vasarhelyi, who is also a research fellow at Eotvos Lorand University, one of Hungary's oldest. CollMot’s drones were inspired by models he created with his team about collective animal behaviours – birds in a flock, for example. Looking to apply science to entertainment, Vasarhelyi launched CollMot in 2015.
The drones, of course, are nowhere near as autonomous as animals. But for all the entertainment it provides, CollMot is also committed to research in evolutionary computation – the branch of AI based on the idea that mimicking natural processes enables artificial evolution.
Its latest study on optimising the flocking of drones saw, for the first time, a swarm released with no pre-programmed route other than a basic “instinct” to fly, and autonomously synchronising as a flock simply by watching each other. The drones followed the three basic rules of animal flocking: move away from neighbours that are too close, get closer to those too far, and align with nearby flyers.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
