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Stop the world! It seems we have (yet again!) found a new use for drones – building suspension rope bridges.
A team of techies at ETH Zurich programmed a few self-piloting drones as part of a project to create a functional 7.4-metre bridge that’s strong enough to hold a person.
The project, called Aerial Construction, is a collaboration between the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and Gramazio Kohler Research. Their aim is to “investigate and develop methods and techniques for robotic aerial construction”.
The video, which was posted on YouTube, shows flying quadcopters using super-strong Dyneema rope to build the bridge. Dyneema was chosen because of its low weight-to-strength ratio and is suited for aerial construction.
The drones were fitted with a motorised spool, which allowed them to control the rope’s tension.
A motion capture system was used to make sure the drones were in their correct positions throughout the process and the forces exerted by the rope on these gizmos were factored in to ensure the drones were flying in their correct path.
The tiny copters received commands wirelessly from a computer running the algorithm that calculated their flying trajectories.
However, drones can’t do everything and there has been some human effort involved. For starters, these flying machines didn’t build the scaffolding to which the ropes were attached. Also, all the measurements had to be done manually by the researchers and fed into the system.
The project, which was part of research into aerial construction, aims to take construction of structures to the next level – with the help of flying machines.
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