Anything that looks easy is hard, ETH catching copter the Omnicopter

Hats off to ETH, yet again they make something very difficult look very simple. Catch a ball in a net with a multirotor.

Let’s unpack it a little. The multirotor has 8 angled motors, this allows it to be positioned with a greater deal of precision and almost not caring which way up is. Translation without rotation.

It does not have to tilt as much to move so it keeps the net pretty level. Ok, it’s in a motion capture rig at the moment but we all know that changes.

Omnicopter, looks like the future of infrastructure inspection to me.

We have developed a computationally efficient trajectory generator for six degrees-of-freedom multirotor vehicles, i.e. vehicles that can independently control their position and attitude. The trajectory generator is capable of generating approximately 500’000 trajectories per second that guide the multirotor vehicle from any initial state, i.e. position, velocity and attitude, to any desired final state in a given time. In this video, we show an example application that requires the evaluation of a large number of trajectories in real time.

* Multirotor vehicle The multirotor vehicle used in the demonstration is an omni-directional eight-rotor vehicle. Its unique actuator configuration gives it full force and torque authority in all three dimensions, allowing it to fly novel maneuvers.

For more details, please refer to the Youtube video or the research paper: – “The Omnicopter”: https://youtu.be/sIi80LMLJSY –

“Design, Modeling and Control of an Omni-Directional Aerial Vehicle”, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2016: http://flyingmachinearena.org/wp-cont…. * Researchers Dario Brescianini and Raffaello D’Andrea Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control (IDSC), ETH Zurich, Switzerland – http://www.idsc.ethz.ch * Location Flying Machine Arena, ETH Zurich, Switzerland – http://www.flyingmachinearena.org