Drones evolve from killing to rebuilding

It is the 17th March 2011 and there is a distant humming from the sky over the Waziristan mountains, on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it is an unmanned aerial vehicle (a drone to you and me) that is about to fire three missiles into a community meeting.

In this case the drone with its laser-guided missile remained faithful to its original military use, killing 40 civilians in a misinformed attempt to assassinate a Taliban senior.

First entering the skies in the late 1800s in balloon form, drones have since been intensely researched and developed by the U.S. army. Nowadays these unmanned, aircraft come in an array of shapes and sizes. They are used to investigate hard-to-reach places, such as the sheets of ice on the Arctic Ocean, and are pre-programmed to carry out a mission or controlled by pilots on the ground.

Their versatility is a result of the on-board machinery that make drones specific to their task. In an Arctic ice mission for example, the drone carries scientific instruments such as cameras capable of detecting visible and infrared light. This allows scientists to see the structure of disintegrating ice in areas where it would otherwise be perilous to tread. Military weapons and climate scientists aside, drones have found another friend: the 3-D printer. In February, Dr Mirko Kovac and his team at Imperial College London, together with partners at Bath University, UCL and the Dyson robotics lab, received £3.4 million for a project involving aerial construction-bots, this time arming drones with 3-D printing technology.

“These autonomous [self-directing] vehicles that are able to precisely deposit structural material from the air, could manufacture buildings and repair infrastructure elements.” says Dr Kovac, a specialist in aerial robotics.

The process followed by these “builder robots” is called Additive Building Manufacturing (ABM) where drones excrete materials to build structures. In times of disaster all sorts of obstructions can prevent humans from accessing the damaged region. Dr Kovac’s team are hopeful that this new technology will allow robots to fly into these areas and print new buildings.

“The approach that we take to develop these vehicles is conceptually inspired from nest-building animals that build large structures using collective behaviours”.

Thus thanks to scientists such as Dr Kovac, military technology is evolving. With the potential to rebuild lives, it seems drones have come a long way since the 17th March 2011.