Vijay Kumar, a roboticist and drone expert, talked about the recent challenges of working on drones and unmanned aerial vehicles during this spring semester’s first installment of the University Lectures series.

Kumar is a professor of engineering, mechanics and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in robotics and drone technology. He has taught at UPenn since 1987 and leads a drone lab there.

More than 100 people attended his lecture in Hendricks Chapel on Tuesday night. The audience gasped at videos of drones that were, literally, programmed to jump through hoops. No actual drones were brought to the lecture.

Gurdip Singh, associate dean for research in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, introduced Kumar as an accomplished roboticist.

“His lab is phenomenal,” Singh said. “If anyone can do anything with robotics, it’s Vijay Kumar.”

The number of unmanned aerial vehicles has grown exponentially since the 1980s, Kumar said. They have been used in agricultural and the military industries, he said. The drone industry’s revenue grew by 36 percent in 2016, according to Business Insider.

“Our focus, as we think about where we want to get, is to make vehicles smaller, safer, smarter and then make them faster,” Kumar said.

The more autonomy a drone has, the larger it must be, he said. More autonomous drones require more sensors and parts, he said, and must be bigger.

Kumar mentioned a drone his lab is working on named “The Falcon,” which can travel at speeds of 20 mph indoors. In the future, drones can be used for search and rescue missions and crop monitoring through “precision farming.”

Drones, though, have issues when it comes to navigating cluttered environments, Kumar said. But those issues can be remedied by laser depth perception and cameras. Cluttered environments can include a simple drone navigating a forest, he said.

“What we’re trying to do is to find safe trajectories … that minimize time as I go from one position to another,” Kumar said.

Kumar and his team have programmed drones to learn and adapt so they can navigate new environments without GPS. Drones at Kumar’s lab can identify obstacles on their own and have “situational awareness,” both indoors and outdoors.

He said he’s excited about artificial intelligence, and has integrated deep learning into drones for activities such as fruit counting on farms. He said he doesn’t know, though, if machines are becoming smarter or more autonomous. While machines can crunch numbers and make complex calculations faster, it does not mean they are more autonomous or “smarter,” he said.

His lab also developed a 250-gram drone that can be operated with hardware less complicated than that of an older smartphone. Trends in drone technology are pointing to smaller vehicles, he said.

“If there’s one thing we know, humans will not want to carry heavy expensive things in their back pocket,” Kumar said.

Groups of these smaller drones programmed together act as “swarms,” navigating together as a kind of body, Kumar said.

“Part of this is just waiting for technology to evolve and for consumer habits to drive the technology,” Kumar said.

Answering an audience question, Kumar said a lot of drones’ commercialization is driven by people wanting to take “glorified selfies,” but camera drones are also being used to aid with water conservation on farms.

Kumar is the recipient of many awards — including the 1991 National Science Foundation Young Investigator award; the 1997 Freudenstein Award for his work in mechanisms and robotics; the 2013 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough award and the 2017 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation.

Other University Lectures speakers include Maureen Dowd on April 13 and Rick Fedrizzi on April 24. Dowd is an award-winning journalist, and Fedrizzi is a Syracuse University alumnus and environmentalist.

Published on February 20, 2018 at 10:48 pm

Contact Kennedy: krose100@syr.edu | @KennedyRose001