In 1998 Rafaello D’Andrea founded the Cornell University Robot Soccer Team to compete in the Robot World Cup Initiative, otherwise known as RoboCup.  The purpose of RoboCup was to encourage research in the design and development of artificial intelligence and robots.  Under the directorship of D’Andrea the Cornell team went on to win RoboCup the first year they competed in 1999, surpassing the favored winners, the FU-Fighters from the Free University of Berlin, Germany.  After his win, D’Andrea and his co researchers began thinking of ways to expand their research off of a small soccer pitch and into a third dimension.

D’Andrea and his team began work on creating small aerial vehicles along with a system to track and control them.  The first drone built in D’Andrea’s study was by engineering student Andy Eichelberger, completed by Matt Earl in 2000.  They built a rudimentary quadrocopter covered in LED lights.  They then used three different cameras simultaneously to study the drone in flight.  The next step in their research came to finding a perfect environment in which to study in detail the flying robots they had built.  In 2002 students Eryk Nice and Sean Breheny, followed by Oliver Purwin built the next quadrocopter prototype, a much larger and more sophisticated one.

Still at Cornell in 2003, D’Andrea was granted permission to use the university’s High Voltage Laboratory into the Cornell Laboratory for Intelligent Vehicles.  Now with 15,000 square and a 50 foot high ceiling, the team had plenty of space to test the drones they were building.  Unfortunately, these plans were put on hold as D’Andrea partnered up with Mick Mountz and Peter Wurman to create the robotics and logistics company Kiva Systems.  The lab in Cornell is now used as a student project/research space.

In 2007, with the success of Kiva Systems well under way, D’Andrea decided to go back to his roots in the educational field.  He joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) with one stipulation.  That they agree to build for him and his students a space like the one he had envisioned at Cornell.  And it was the perfect time for such a project to commence.  In the five years he was focused on building Kiva Systems, robotic and drone technology progressed to a point that his vision could access the tools needed to see it to fruition.

That vision turned into the Flying Machine Arena (FMA).  According to their website, “The Flying Machine Arena (FMA) is a portable space devoted to autonomous flight. Measuring up to 10 x 10 x 10 meters, it consists of a high-precision motion capture system, a wireless communication network, and custom software executing sophisticated algorithms for estimation and control.  The motion capture system can locate multiple objects in the space at rates exceeding 200 frames per second. While this may seem extremely fast, the objects in the space can move at speeds in excess of 10 m/s, resulting in displacements of over 5 cm between successive snapshots. This information is fused with other data and models of the system dynamics to predict the state of the objects into the future.”

This far surpassed the data D’Andrea and his students were able to collect in the early 2000’s.  The FMA is proving to provide the perfect conditions for studying how drones can be studied for adaptive behaviors.  This is a key aspect in determining how drones can be safely used in society for any number of scenarios.  Since it’s inception the FMA has been used for many studies, studies that have led to companies developing drones for practical daily use.  As D’Andrea said himself, “The time for the FMA had finally arrived.”

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