We've seen flying drones race, fly in formations or even fire guns, but this project takes the little flying machines' usability to the next level by having several drones build an actual rope bridge.
Called "Aerial Construction," the project is a joint effort by Zurich's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and Gramazio Kohler Research, with the goal to "investigate and develop methods and techniques for robotic aerial construction."
The result, which you can see in the video posted on YouTube last week (above), is quite stunning: Flying quadrocopters use strong Dyneema rope to build a fully functional, 7.4-meter bridge, strong enough to withstand a person's weight.
Even more impressively, the drones do this autonomously, receiving commands wirelessly from a computer running the algorithm which calculates the correct flying trajectories. There are two exceptions, though: the drones cannot build the scaffolding to which the rope ends are attached, and the measurements have to be done manually by the researchers.
A lot of technical wizardry went into the project. The drones are equipped with a motorized spool, enabling them to control the rope's tension, and the forces that the rope exerts on the drones had to be taken into account to ensure the drones are flying how they're supposed to. The research that went into that last bit could prove important in the future, when -- for example -- a drone helps a worker on a construction site fling a rope over a tall obstacle.