Drones are mostly toys, right now; while some are used for serious scientific research, most are used by sports filmmakers to catch extreme angles or by idiots to make wildfires substantially worse. But as battery life improves and drones become easier to control, more and more ideas are developed to make them useful. Like, for example, this trio of drones building a rope bridge.
Rope bridges are useful structures, but they’re complex ones and they’re often needed in urgent situations to get people across gaps or otherwise. You need somebody with specialized knowledge and a lot of rope; those usually aren’t around in emergency situations. So some Swiss engineers built custom drones to automatically build the bridge.
It’s especially impressive as these engineers used quadcopters, which you might note have no fingers; they had to work out how to fly the drones in such a way that they created secure knots by weaving in and around a support structure. And, as you can see, the bridge is fully walkable by a normal-sized human being.
This is still a concept, for the most part; obviously it would need to be scaled up and a few technical problems, like installing that scaffolding in an emergency area, would need to be addressed. But it’s proof that soon, drones might be useful for more than just YouTube videos.
(via The Daily Dot)