Premiere: The AirShield Measurement Robots shown Swarming for the first time

Dortmund, 18.05.2009

About one year after the start of the AirShield project, our team of scientists and engineers has integrated a development platform based on swarm-control of flying robots in order to measure and evaluate the air quality.

Complementary to related MUAV swarm projects undertaken for example at the Aerospace Controls Laboratory at MIT Boston, which demonstrated the implementation of their swarm-based flight control system in indoor environments, the AirShield research team  has demonstrated the effectiveness of their swarm-control model in a field test as seen in the video clip above. The results and experience gathered from the field test not only demonstrated the robust model of our control system but it also proved its practical applicability in emergency situations such as may emerge during fire fighting missions.

It was only due to the professional excellence and dedication of the project team that we have been able to meet this intermediate but important performance milestone as dictated by the “completion and specification” status of the project. The development process saw a seamless interdisciplinary cross-cooperation amongst various disciplines such as communications, robotics, distributed artificial intelligence and geo-informatics. With the development of this swarm-control platform we are now in a unique position to integrate the technical competencies of our various partners into a single workable solution. We are confident to successfully overcome the scientific and technical rigors and challenges imposed by the project requirements.