Robotics undoubtedly has the potential to improve lives in the developing world. However, with limited budgets and expertise on the ground, putting this technology in place is no small task. Step forwards WeRobotics, a new Swiss/American NGO dedicated to meeting this goal through the creation of in-country ‘flying labs’. Co-founder Adam Klaptocz explains all.

Hey Adam. Let’s start with this: what is WeRobotics?

WeRobotics is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) dedicated to bringing developing countries access to robotics technology. Such countries don’t have access because of economics, supply chains and many other reasons. Our role is to help local people learn and use this technology, and then to deploy it for social good projects within their own communities.

We do this by establishing ‘flying labs’ in different countries. The goal of each is to serve as a hub of robotics technology, where staff host training sessions, webinars and teach people how to use technology. Each lab will have drones and software, on hand and in the cloud, thanks to our technology company partners. Labs will also function as an incubator for new, local, drone-based businesses.

WeRobotics co-founder Adam Klaptocz (right) and Nepal Flying Labs Coordinator Uttam Pudasaini, running a drone mapping training session in Kathmandu, Nepal.

And who is behind WeRobotics?

We have four co-founders; myself and Sonja Betschart are based in Switzerland, and Patrick Meier and Andrew Schroeder, who are based in the U.S. We are a 501c3 non-profit organisation in the United States and have just founded a sister organisation in Switzerland too. Besides that, all of our flying labs will be legal entities as well, to go along with the concept of building local capacities and driving local engagement.

The goal is to engage local lab coordinators, local organisations, and ideally make the local flying lab its own organisation that has its own activities and is sustainable

The goal is to engage local lab coordinators, local organisations, and ideally make the local flying lab its own organisation that has its own activities and is sustainable
The goal is to engage local lab coordinators, local organisations, and ideally make the local flying lab its own organisation that has its own activities and is sustainable

And you’re talking about unmanned robots in their most general sense, not just as a synonym for flying drones?

That’s right. At WeRobotics, we’re looking at robotics in the largest sense—it’s not just eBee drones for mapping, it’s also things like drones for delivery, marine robots, underwater robots, and terrestrial robots. Anything to do with robotics and the technical ecosystem that goes around it. That includes the software and the platforms people use to share a drone’s data because, in the end, drones are just a tool for collecting and turning the data into actionable information.

We have tech partners, such as senseFly and other drone and software companies, with whom we are spreading this technology throughout our network of labs. The labs will then run training programmes, serve as incubators for locals who want to get into the business, and host conferences where these adopters can share their experiences.

So do you already have your first lab set-up? Where is that?

Absolutely, we’re a young NGO, but we’re trying to expand quite quickly.

Our first lab was officially launched recently in Nepal. It’s called Nepal Flying Labs. We have a local lab coordinator there and we’ve partnered with Kathmandu University, ICIMOD, which is a mountain and glacier study organisation, NAXA and Medair. We’re working with government agencies as well, including the survey department of the Nepalese government. So we have a certain number of partners that we’re working with to roll out projects and run trainings.

We have projects that will be running throughout the next year in Kathmandu and the surrounding areas; a lot of which is post-earthquake reconstruction work after last year’s earthquake. Also, a lot of climate-based research work.

That must be ground zero, that region, for such scientific study?

Exactly. Nepal is basically a giant mountain so the effects of climate change are really affecting communities there. There are a lot of landslides – the Himalayas are melting, the glaciers are melting – so there is a lot of work to be done in terms of disaster prevention and also in post-disaster reconstruction.

And in Tanzania, where we are setting up more flying labs. I know there’s already been a lot of work there by senseFly, Drone Adventures [case study], The World Bank and other organisations. We’re hoping to work with these organisations and others to consolidate a lot of the work that’s been done; to make it sustainable for years to come within Tanzania.

Our third major lab that we are setting up before the end of the year is in Peru. In Peru, we will start in the Amazon. Our first pilot project there is about drone delivery, but we’ll also be spinning out drone mapping as a business and other types of robotics as well.

In the countries where you operate, is one of the groups you’re engaging with the government itself? Do you see your role to also help governments regulate the use of drones?

The mandate of each flying lab, as an NGO, isn’t to replace government, it’s to help.

So the first thing to do is to work with the government and try to help boost, for example, its capacity for mapping. That’s something that we believe in strongly. We’re already working with the survey department in Kathmandu and we’ll be working with the Lands Department in Tanzania as well to try to reinforce their capacity to serve their own people. On top of that, of course, we want to be able to work within countries – within the rules of those countries – and so we’re trying to help with regulations, by working with the regulatory authorities in all of these countries.

A lot of developing countries are looking for guidance from other countries – where robotic technology might be a little more established – to see what is happening. That’s another thing that we hope, as an international NGO with locations all around the world, we’ll be able to facilitate—helping governments to learn what works in other countries, such as those our network covers, and helping them to work together, often with the civil aviation authority and other government agencies. It’s about implementing rules that make drone use responsible, but also leave the market open so that we can incubate businesses. Like that, the economy can develop around this technology instead of being blocked.

You mentioned before we started recording that the key, underpinning what WeRobotics is about, is building capacity on the ground.

Yes, that’s the key, local capacity. It shouldn’t have to be that a bunch of foreigners come in to do this work whichever way they want, often with their own desires, with their own culture and their own needs. Basically, making themselves feel good about helping instead of actually helping.

What would be best, if this ever happens again in Nepal, is that there are enough drone companies locally that know what they’re doing, and understand the legal framework within the country, so that they can do the job instead of having to bring in foreigners. And that goes for every country. I think that, in development, the more local capacity you build, the more you can really bring the country out of poverty so that it can have its economy self-sustain itself.

That’s our goal with the flying labs: to build self-sustainable local entities that build local capacity but have global contact with other labs and with our global technology partners.

What specific UAV platforms do you operate at present and how are these being used?

I truly believe that every job has a tool that’s best adapted to it. In Nepal, right now, our flying lab has aneBee and a Parrot Bebop drone. The eBee is used because Nepal is obviously very mountainous and having the capacity to deal with 3D flight mapping is very important.

Meanwhile, in Tanzania there are larger, mainly flat zones to be mapped. For that we have a Sky-Watch Cumulus drone. This is a longer-range drone that can fly for two hours and cover very large areas. So there that’s the best adapted drone. We’re also bringing a Bebop to Tanzania, because there is a big interest in drone journalism there and for that it’s important to have something that is small, cheap and easily deployed.

Then in Peru, we’re working with hybrid drones that are made more for cargo delivery. One option isQuantum Systems, which is a German company that makes even bigger, VTOL drones with an even bigger payload capacity.

So, different drones for different jobs.

100% platform agnostic.

Yes. One of our goals as an NGO is to remain more or less independent of technology. What’s important is that the job can be done with the best fit technology, in an economically viable way. We need UAVs that are easy to use, easy to train on, and relatively mature as well.

One of our goals as an NGO is to remain more or less independent of technology. What’s important is that the job can be done with the best fit technology, in an economically viable way.

We do work with some startups, but in general what you really need, if you want to make something work in the jungles of Papua New Guinea or in the middle of the desert somewhere, is a machine that’s durable and that has existed for a little while. A platform that has some sort of customer support is needed too, so it’s important that our technology company partners are happy to be involved as well.

If you imagine a few years down the road, having achieved your short and medium term goals, how does the world of WeRobotics look then?

We see ourselves, a few years down the road, having many flying labs around the world. We’re not sure if we’ll have five, or ten, or if there’ll be 50, but the goal is that we have setup a network of many flying labs in different countries.

And you’re planning on developing some in-house engineering capacity too?

Yes, because there are many problems, like conservation in developing countries, which can be solved with existing technology. But there are also many problems that can be solved with technology, but the technology doesn’t exist yet, because the people developing the technology—whether it’s Silicon Valley, China, or Europe—aren’t necessarily aware of the problems that exist in developing countries.

Whatever works, whatever’s needed to meet your goals on the ground then?

Yes. Unfortunately, there is no lack of work in development. Poverty is not disappearing next year. It’s not a market that you have to grasp today otherwise tomorrow it has been taken over. There is a huge amount of work left to do, and there’s definitely enough to go around.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Cargo drones deliver in the Amazon rainforest
• The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 2/13/17
• The art of drone flight: Creating drone costumes
• The Monospinner: world’s mechanically simplest controllable flying machine
• Flying cars are coming, what will they mean?

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Last month we caught up with Dario Floreano, the head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Here we continue our discussion, covering acoustic sensing, multi-drone operations and more. Missed Part 1? Check it out here.

Last time we spoke, we discussed your work on visual perception, but you also mentioned acoustic research. So this means we’re talking about ‘listening drones’?

Yes, that’s right. This is particularly interesting in the area of drone swarming, whereby multiple robots need to coordinate their flights very carefully.

The first big problem with swarming is perceiving the other drones. If you have multiple drones in flight, each robot is only a very small spot in the other robots’ visual fields of view. They’re very hard to spot against the background. So we thought, what about sound detection?

The question is, how can a robot hear other robots when it is in flight? Well actually, this is a simple trick. You simply switch the engine off, very briefly, listen using three tiny microphones pointing in different directions, then restart the engine. Just like the eBee does when it is capturing aerial photos. Using this trick we developed drones that can detect the presence and relative direction of other drones acoustically.

Outside of the lab, what do you see are some of the potential end applications of your work?

Sticking with the acoustic approach, this could be useful in search and rescue, being used to detect people’s locations on the ground. If people are lost in snow or in a forest, they often have emergency whistles. We have shown that we can locate a person using a standard emergency whistle and broadcast its GPS coordinates to a rescue team.

With swarming, we’re also looking at using drones as relay networks for communication between rescue and security teams on the ground.

In the event of an earthquake, a fire or a landslide, the first thing an emergency team usually does is to set-up its communication infrastructure. This typically consists of a set of trucks with radio signal emitters and receivers, which operate on a specific frequency. It can take one or several hours to complete this set-up before rescuers can start working on the ground, using their receivers.

However drones can be equipped with emitters and receivers. Therefore a swarm of drones could cover the area, pick up the signals of the rescue team on the ground, and relay these, connecting people via very low power, short-range emitters. Currently with this technique we can connect multiple people, and not only with audio but with video signals too.

We’re also experimenting with multiple people moving around on the ground, with robots following their movement, and we’re considering operations that last longer than a single battery duration of around half an hour. We’re developing an algorithm that allows drones to land for a battery change, while new drones with a full battery launch to continue the service.

So on one hand your work is bio-inspired research, but you’re obviously also thinking about the potential real-world applications of the technology you develop. Which point do you start from—do you look at biology first and then consider how to use the tech that comes out of that research, or do real-world problems drive the direction your biological research takes?

It’s a mix. When it comes to drones, 15 years ago it was more blue sky research. These days however I have more projects on flying robots that could solve problems that people might face, not necessarily next year but in five years’ time. For example, if you will have lots of drones all in the air, you then think about safety. That means thinking about AI and sensing.

The specific applications are not always there though. For example, when the Gimbal was designed we didn’t have an application in mind, just a problem: how to design a robot that could withstand falls and fly again. We started by adding retractable legs, as insects have, but this wasn’t optimal, so we came up with a rolling cage around the drone. Then we realised the application: being able to go where other drones couldn’t go.

Prof. Floreano’s work at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) is bio-inspired; he and his team develop flying robots with animal characteristics, which they also use to learn more about animals.

In swarming there are lots of interesting problems to think about. In the future, as I mentioned, we’ll have a very high number of drones sharing our airspace. We’ll have a lot of crowding in areas such as landing spots and drone airways.

The big question is this: how will these drones avoid each other? Commercial GPS isn’t good enough to enable this avoidance when you fly very close to other drones. So the question is: what are the best sensors and the best control algorithms, both for drones flying in cooperative conditions—meaning the same types of drone flying in the same area—and non-cooperative conditions featuring drones from different manufacturers using different sensors? This is a real problem that some of our research is addressing, regarding the sensors and algorithms we’re developing.

Another real problem comes in transportation: how can we transport parcels very safely? I can’t talk about the solution just yet, but our work there builds on a lot of the topics we’ve been discussing.

Which seems a logical place to wrap up! Thank you so much for all these insights. How can readers who are interested in learning more follow your lab’s work?

The homepage of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems is at lis.epfl.ch. That page includes our most recent publications. We also have a LIS YouTube channel that people can subscribe to and I am on Twitter at @DFloreano. 

You are also involved with the RobotsPodcast, is that correct?

Well, I was involved in its creation, back when it was called Talking Robots, and I supported it from my lab for two years. The podcast grew and grew, and the students that were preparing it then set-up what is known today as theRobotsPodcast. Many members of LIS still work on this on a voluntary basis. It became so successful that it also spurned another, wider organisation, calledRobohub.

Thanks for your time!

You’re very welcome.

Watch Floreano’s ROBOTS14 presentation:

===========================
About Dario Floreano

Dario Floreano (M.A. 1988; M.S. 1992; Ph.D. 1995) is the director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics. He is co-founder of the company senseFly S.A., of the International Society for Artificial Life, and founder of the popular robotics podcast series Talking Robots (which later became RobotsPodcast).

He has been on the advisory board of the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, vice-chair of the Global Agenda Council on Robotics and Smart Devices of the World Economic Forum, and on the board of governors of the International Society for Neural Networks. Floreano is a senior member of the IEEE and received several national and international awards for professional and cultural achievements. Floreano has published four books, more than 300 technical articles, and more than 10 patents in drone technologies.
===========================

As head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, Dario Floreano knows a thing or two about flying robots. In the first segment of a two-part conversation, Waypoint caught up with Floreano to discuss his team’s drone research, the potential applications of such innovations, and more.

Could you start by giving our readers a little background on the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) at EPFL?

Yes of course. I started the laboratory in the year 2000 and today we have around 20 researchers. senseFly’s CEO [Jean-Christophe Zufferey] was actually one of my first PhD students. 

I had always been interested in bio-inspired artificial intelligence and robotics. I had two interests in particular. First was designing systems with animal characteristics; robust systems capable of solving problems that couldn’t be predicted in a changing environment. And the other interest, by contrast, is using these tools to better understand biology.

At LIS we work closely with biologists to extract principles from animals, such as how their vision works, then we translate these principles into control algorithms to manage a robot’s performance as the corresponding animal does. In other words, we use biology to design better robots and we use robots to understand more about biology.

Dario Floreano is a leading researcher in the field of flying robots, as well one of senseFly’s original co-founders.

Where does this bio-inspiration lead you in practice? What are some key themes?

Our activities focus on three core themes: flying robots, soft robots and evolutionary robots.

Since Waypoint is all about the professional use of flying robots, or drones, could we dig down into this area some more? Why flying robots? What’s the specific interest there?

Why flying robots? Because they’re very challenging!

They need to be very lightweight but at the same time you have to include energy, computing power, sensors… this is a really challenging job. This challenge is why I thought bio-inspired solutions would provide an advantage compared to traditional approaches. That’s the point we started from when Jean-Christophe Zufferey was working in my lab originally.

So what has your drone research typically looked into, and how do you see this work evolving in future?

If you want to have robots capable of flying in cluttered environments, they need to be able to ‘see’ in these spaces. So right now we’re looking at different sensor modalities: vision, in particular compound vision, which insects use, and acoustic sensing. The latter is mainly used for coordinating the flight of multiple drones, which we call swarming. We also do research in drone communication for coordinated flight and aerial telecommunication networks, but this work is less bio-inspired.

Other thing one needs to look at is how the body of a robot is designed. They need to be very agile to fly in cluttered environments so we’re looking at robots with adaptive morphology, drones that can change their shapes to transition between fixed wing and rotary formats, which each have their own pros and cons in terms of flight times and agility.

On this morphology front, you’ve been looking into folding drones?

Yes. So with morphology we’re also looking at size. In order to carry larger payloads, typically this means a larger drone. You have two choices when looking to carry larger payloads: either fly faster or accelerate propeller rotation, or increase the surface of the aerial surfaces. What people typically do is to increase the size of the props or the wings. This ends up with larger drones, which leads to problems transporting them and when making them fly through narrow passages. So we’ve been looking into the concept of foldability. We are looking at origami technology to make drones that you can easily carry on your pocket. There’s also the issue then of controlling such systems; how to make such drones stable after they open.

We’re also studying artificial muscles made of soft actuators, which could be used one day for foldable drones.

When you fly in really difficult situations— with things like cables around—then sooner or later there will be contact. This brings the question: how do you protect the robot, the environment and the people who come into contact with it?

One very simple way is to add a cage or a gimbal (such as Flyability’s Gimbal, which is another spin-off of my laboratory), and another way we’re now looking at is using new types of materials. Materials that minimise damage, absorb collision and then revert back to their original shape.

I’d like to go back to perception. You mentioned working on two sensor modalities: vision and acoustic sensing. Can we explore the first a little further?

Sure. When it comes to a robot’s perception, we’ve been working on vision for a long time. Most recently in this area we’ve been working on designing new types of vision sensors that mimic the compound vision of insects.

Conventional cameras are designed on the same principles of the vertebrate eye whereby an image is perceived via a very dense, high number of photoreceptors under a single lens. The advantage of this conventional approach is very fine picture quality, but on the downside you have a very limited field of view.

Now, when you have a drone, you want to have a very wide field of view because you need to see in many more directions than a terrestrial animal. But if you simply increase the number of cameras to achieve this, then you increase the weight. Insects on the other hand, with their compound eyes, cover a very wide field of view by using hundreds of simpler miniature eyes, with just a few photoreceptors under each lens pointing in the desired directions. Their perception is the mosaic image that results from these thin eyes.

So we decided to design new miniature sensors made from very simple cameras, each with between one and three photoreceptors, and a very narrow view lens. Only instead of three or four of these cameras we have hundreds of them. This insect-like approach gives a very wide field of view and the insect-inspired photoreceptors give us very fast reaction time; we can extract optic flow three times faster than insects can! However the drawback is that the images are not very fine, so these cameras are for navigation, not for taking pictures. (Read the paper: Miniature curved artificial compound eyes, or see the Robohub article here. )

The team at LIS has adopted an insect-like approach to vision – designing new miniature sensors made from very simple cameras, each with between one and three photoreceptors and a very narrow view lens.

What stage of development are you at with these multi-camera, insect-vision robots?

We have produced a few first prototypes. The cameras themselves are less than a millimetre thick and each weighs less than a milligram. We can also arrange them on fully flexible substrates, which I call “vision tapes”. These are packed full of sensors and you can wrap them around parts of the robot.

The challenge with our current prototype is that it has a very limited vision range—it can only see up to a maximum of 50 cm. So we’re working on designing of new type of sensor, which has a longer range but is still very simple to produce.

Thank you very much for your time!

You’re very welcome.

Read Part 2.

===========================
About Dario Floreano

Dario Floreano (M.A. 1988; M.S. 1992; Ph.D. 1995) is the director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems and director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics. He is co-founder of the company senseFly S.A., of the International Society for Artificial Life, and founder of the popular robotics podcast series Talking Robots (which later became RobotsPodcast).

He has been on the advisory board of the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, vice-chair of the Global Agenda Council on Robotics and Smart Devices of the World Economic Forum, and on the board of governors of the International Society for Neural Networks. Prof. Floreano is a senior member of the IEEE and received several national and international awards for professional and cultural achievements. Prof. Floreano has published four books, more than 300 technical articles, and more than 10 patents in drone technologies.