Watch these drones build a rope bridge that’s safe to walk on

While we all wait for Amazon – and, perhaps more importantly, takeaway pizza companies – to start delivering by drone, a group of researchers in Switzerland has programmed three drones to construct a rope bridge without any human help. Researchers from ETH Zurich and an architecture firm called Gramazio Kohler Research have chose to try something a bit different with two drones.

Machines have built numerous things we use on a daily basis, but scientists are working on a whole new aspect in this field using drones.

The project wasn’t without issue; researchers had to deal with the drone’s limited payload capacity. So, getting something like this to work over the river Kwai is going to take a bit more work, but I love the idea of (eventually) pulling a few flying robots out of a backpack and commanding them to make a bridge while I eat a sandwich and watch. Because the spools are motorized, the drones can control the tension on the rope they deploy as they fly. Except, this obstacle course is built from 120 meters of high specific-strength Dyneema rope.

In the video demonstration the drones were aided in their agile airborne navigation by the deployment of a motion capture system around the scaffolding. Algorithms are run on a computer and commands are then sent to the flying machines via a customized wireless infrastructure.

The rope bridge acts as a demonstrator, showing for the first time that small flying machines are capable of autonomously realizing load-bearing structures at full-scale and proceeding a step further towards real-world scenarios. After feeding in this information into the system, the two drones were able to jump into action and go about the process of building out the rope bridge in tandem, completely unassisted.

It’s both an exciting and frightening time for drone advancements.