Aggressive Maneuvers for Autonomous Quadrotor Flight

The simple matter is that the implications of these drones reaches far beyond simply building things, like showing one aspect of what a hammer can be used to build. The real takeaway is the radical increase in the abilities of flying drones, and the raw potential they leave to be harnessed by future engineers and entrepreneurs. Those who discount their usefulness by staying within the context of the video, and not elaborating outside of that, aren't getting it. I would refer you especially to @burgerbrain's comment and the videos he posted. Specifically: [VIDEO]

This lab has several other videos with quad rotor robots like this (e.g. [VIDEO] ), but don't worry about them escaping and starting a robot domination: they rely on infrared motion capture systems in that room for extremely precise location sensing. Once GPS gets sub-meter accuracy, then we should start worrying.

Did you watch the same videos I did? They have these things lifting sizeable pieces of 2x4's ( [LINK] ) and they pull of some pretty absurd manoeuvring ( [VIDEO] ) and recovery ( [LINK] ). Navigational issues resolved, I have a hard time seeing these things having trouble with a modest wind.

I'm completely with you, and it could be a great way to get the public interested in (i.e. funding) technology. It reminds me of when auto racing actually led to improvements for street cars. I mean kids already love various robotic cartoons - who wouldn't love the same as a real-life game. Attendance could be a little dangerous though... Let's hope UPenn's QuadRotor Lab is in the running. [VIDEO]

People like the GRASP[1] guys: [VIDEO] are probably somewhere pretty high on that list. They still need to solve the location sensing issues though - having high-precision calibrated wall mounted sensors aren't really practical for ad-hoc use. I don't doubt that someone will solve this problem in the not-too-distant future though, and heavily autonomous quadrotor aerostats will be in heavy use. [1] [LINK]

I think you're referring to the grasp lab at UPenn, they did stuff with quad rotors landing on Velcro. [VIDEO] Georgia Tech did more with the larger Yamaha Rmax helicopter. [LINK]

Projects using quadrotors to do things like fly cooperatively and do acrobatics [1,2] will often use high speed motion capture systems with multiple fixed cameras. This decouples the problem of perceiving the environment from the problem of responding to the environment. More broadly in robotics there are plenty of people working on ground-based robots that don't rely on multiple fixed high speed cameras - self-driving cars [3] would be one example. There are also people working on cooperative ground based robots that don't rely on multiple fixed high speed cameras - for example, the RoboCupSoccer Middle-Size League [4]. There are also people working on quadrotors that don't cooperate/do acrobatics and who don't rely on fixed vision systems - for example people working on autonomous quadrotor mapping [5] and using IMUs and on-robot vision [6]. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK]

I believe this is possible. Just look at these autonomous drones doing stunts: [VIDEO] Delivering a packet is much easier than the stuff the are doing in this vid.