WATCH: (Scroll Down For Video) A team of scientists have now taught multiple drones to construct a rope bridge suspended from a pair of scaffold platforms.
The drones carry the rope and use a range of highly elaborate maneuvers to wrap it around each platforms.
The experts from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology even get the drones to ‘braid’ the rope around itself.
The flying machines are able to measure the distance between the two towers before designing and building the rope bridge automatically.
The machines do not need to be flown manually as the software completes the calculations and co-ordinates the intricate flying.
One of the researchers told Qz.com: ‘Flying machines offer a number of advantages compared to traditional construction machines. Specifically, they can reach any point in space and fly in or around existing objects.’
According to the researchers: ‘The rope bridge acts as a demonstrator, showing for the first time that small flying machines are capable of autonomously realising load-bearing structures at full-scale and proceeding a step further towards real-world scenarios.’
The research was completed by Federico Augugliaro, Ammar Mirjan, Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler, and Raffaello D’Andrea.
