Many of you may remember that the original design of our Rooftop Garden Robotics project included a drone to be used to carry the garden’s harvest from the roof to the ground. You may also remember the day we attempted to test this from the Penthouse of STC using a Phantom 4, a plastic hanger, and a small payload (a few small rocks in a plastic container). The initial attempt forced us to remove the small payload because it was to heavy – leaving only the plastic hanger.
Well, let me just tell you – Lawrence spent a great deal of the afternoon chasing the drone in the yard space between STC and HHSB (two buildings on campus across from one another). He may even have chased it into the parking lot. It was a mess.
We realized then that drones couldn’t carry much weight. Since drone design wasn’t a focus of this project, we switched the drone portion of the project for a pulley system! (Don’t laugh! :))
Well, it seems Stanford’s Intelligent Systems Lab may have helped design/create a drone that will pull weight 40 time their weight. Hmmm… Interesting… What do you think?