Our new roommate, the drone

"The city of the future will be a complex ecosystem for humans and robots," says Mirko Kovac. The robotics researcher will be heading the new "NEST Aerial Robotics Hub" at Empa in Dübendorf. As a cooperation between Empa's materials scientists and robotics experts at Imperial College London, the new center will be dedicated to the development and optimization of a new generation of autonomous soft-material drones.

The robots will use the NEST research building of Empa and Eawag as their playing field where they will roam independently as permanent residents, e.g. perform building maintenance and repair tasks. "Autonomous drones will not only increase the efficiency of maintenance work, they will also make it possible to work in places in the building that are difficult or almost impossible for people to access," explains Kovac.

While the scientists from the Aerial Robotics Lab at Imperial College London will chip in their expertise in autonomous drone technology, Empa researchers are contributing their profound knowhow in materials to the new center. "We want to develop drones that are equipped with innovative soft materials," says Tanja Zimmermann, member of Empa's Board of Directors and head of the Functional Materials department.

Such soft materials, for example based on organic compounds, fit well with the strategy of the NEST Aerial Robotics Hub, as the characteristics of the drones are strongly influenced by biological concepts. "We have copied certain principles of the drones from the animal kingdom, for example from birds of prey and spiders," says Kovac. As a kind of immune system of the building, the drones will independently search for repair needs and carry out the necessary work.

How symbiotic this interaction between human inhabitants, drones and buildings will be and whether the new "roommates" will fit into our everyday life will be investigated by the scientists at NEST in the future.