Quadcopter Pair Plays Table Tennis Without The Table

This pair of quad-rotor helicopters does a better job of keeping a ping-pong ball in the air than we could. The two flying drones are performing inside of the flying machine arena, a 1000 cubic meter indoor space surrounded by nets with a foam-padded floor. This makes for a prototype-friendly space, protecting the copters from hard landings and the experimenters from the maiming that might accompany a runaway robot.

This project is headed by researcher [Raffaello D’Andrea]. Previously, we’ve seen his work on a distributed flight array. This time around he’s not working with configurable modules, but completely separate units. Don’t miss the video after the break to see several iterations used to keep a ball in the air. Each bot has the head of a tennis racket mounted at its center. Throw a ball at them and they’ll to what they can to prevent it touching the ground.

While we’re on the topic, we caught a story on NPR about hobby drones. Sounds like their growing popularity has caught the attention of the non-hacker community and restrictions might be on the way. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and make your own flyer while it’s still the wild-west of personal drones.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CR5y8qZf0Y&w=470]

[Thanks Ketin]

22 thoughts on “Quadcopter Pair Plays Table Tennis Without The Table

  1. I think that for the time being, a net is going to thwart even the most savvy, completely run amok AI that is driven to kill all humans flying robot.

    The real question is why more restrictions?

  2. Soon the government will want to “regulate” (i.e. tax or license) these drones. To protect us from terrorism.

    Yes, like Al-Queda gets their ideas from sites like Hackaday.

    Really, Osama?

  3. Paraphrase from “The Amp Hour” (.com) …

    “””All it will take is one idiot with an RC drone to fly over Norad and these quad copters will be banned forever.”””

    Plus I think it looks a bit CGI, but maybe that’s the fluorescent lighting.

  4. Don’t forget that they are not acting fully autonomously.
    There are a bunch of motion capture cams spread around the arena that feed positional data to them.
    That’s how they know where they are and how they “see” the ball.

  5. I think it’s gonna be a while before this type of stuff can be done without an external vision system. Hopefully Moore’s law’ll hold out long enough to give us some self contained evil quad-copters

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