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Shape of the Future

In future UAV use, a police or security office might notice a commotion in a crowded area and toss a small plane up in the air, sending it zooming off to investigate the problem, perhaps to determine a potential terrorist threat. To create the best shape, Lind’s UF lab is studying the complex flight systems of birds and bats to design UAVs as small as three inches across that mimic nature.

“We’re going to need to be able to fly inside a city with great agility,” says Lind. “It makes sense to study how birds and bats change their shape to achieve maneuvering. Seagulls, for instance, move their wings back and forth, and they have shoulder and elbow links, like our arms.”

The UF lab has built micro-UAVs that can change shape as they fly to achieve the optimal configuration for a particular maneuver.

Comprehending the World

Today’s aerial vehicles can send streaming video back to a central control. In the future, soldiers in battle or police officers in a city hope to have vehicles capable of autonomously analyzing video and alerting the attending soldier or officer to a potential threat.

This is the challenge that Mubarak Shah, director of the computer vision lab at the University of Central Florida (UCF), is trying to tackle. His lab is developing a system that not only records video, but can also recognize behaviors such as violence, the movement of people falling down due to a chemical attack, or figures running from a threat.

“The approach is to train the system to recognize example behavior,” says Shah. “We’ll have someone running, and then train the system to learn what that is so it can report back, ‘I saw running.’”

This type of system exists in a fixed land-based video, but developing an equivalent for moving aerial vehicles presents additional computational challenges. Shah’s UCF lab has received Defense Department research funding and is partnering with companies such as Lockheed Martin.

The potential for security applications, law enforcement, and research is vast, says Lind. “For example, police officers would love to have small airplanes that can fly remotely over fields looking for marijuana plants, which today is very dangerous,” says Lind. Researchers haven’t yet developed those capabilities, he adds, “but I believe we’re getting there.”

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