Machine Athleticism

D’Andrea’s talk is about “Machine Athleticism” — the ability of machines to perform dynamic feats that fully exploit their physical capabilities. Part  of a session called “Those Flying Things” (which also features the work of drone ecologist Lian Pin Koh, airborne logistics activist Andreas Raptopoulos and sci-fi author Daniel Suarez), D’Andrea delves into what it takes to make a machine athlete:

We use something broadly called Model Based Design: we first build physics-based models that roughly capture the behavior of the machine; these models are then leveraged by a branch of mathematics called Control Theory to synthesize algorithms for controlling them.

He goes on to show a series of pretty amazing quadrotor feats that would be impossible without sophisticated automatic feedback.


Check out the pages of ETH Zurich’s Flying Machine Arena team