Are you smarter than a nanodrone?

Philadelphians look to autonomous drone technology to fight fires, rescue miners and more.

One of Bill Weaver’s Crazyflie drones.

Here's a glimpse into the future: Firefighters at the scene of a rowhouse fire let loose several nanodrones, each one no bigger than an adult's palm, to fly into houses adjacent to the one ablaze. Equipped with autopilot capabilities, altimeters, pressure sensors, and the same sort of 3D-compass chips embedded in some smartphones, these drones map the insides of the other houses — and dexterously avoid collisions with walls, ceilings, and overturned objects — to discover where fire has spread and who is still trapped within the other houses. In real-time, that information is relayed electronically to fire crews outside still fighting the first fire.

The practicability of a scout drone at the scene of a fire is still a big question — not to mention potentially illegal, given the uncertainty about still-pending drone regulations being crafted by the Federal Aviation Administration. But there are examples of companies experimenting with drones to fight fires aboard ships and to clear minefields. And in Philadelphia, research into using autonomous drones for first responders and rescue operations is already underway.

At La Salle University, students have been working since the summer with Bill Weaver, a professor in the school's Department of Integrated Science, Business and Technology, to graft artificial intelligence algorithms onto five Crazyflies, four-rotor nanodrones that cost just under $200 apiece. (Weaver got his hands on them thanks to a $12,000 grant.) The thinking is that each drone could gain the ability to fly autonomously — according to a specific, written computer algorithm as opposed to a person sending instructions by remote control — to complete particular missions.

"We have little toy algorithms that can find their way out of a maze," Weaver says. "With this particular project what we hoped to do was spring that loose — wouldn't it be cool if we could deploy these onto quadcopters?"

Weaver says an autopilot-enabled quadcopter kitted out the right way — an altimeter to gauge its height, a pressure sensor to let it know when it's flying too close to objects — could have multiple civilian applications. Among them: traffic monitoring, bridge inspection and search and rescue, which is already one realm where  drones have proven effective.

Using tiny drones in this way is something Bala Cynwyd-based company Synfluent has been exploring for underground mine rescue. According to founder and CEO Jefferson Martin, the five-man engineering outfit is currently developing a battery-powered network of LED lights and radio-frequency identification that could be deployed more than 300 feet underground and guide a fleet of autonomous drones as they search for life after mine accidents.

"That network will allow us to fly a quadrotor or a hexarotor into the mine after an accident," says Martin. "This will be able to fly in advance of any rescue teams in case of any kind of accident." Any drones deployed would be looking for specific signs of life, like underground areas with enough air to keep trapped miners alive.

This research, both at La Salle and Synfluent, is still in its earliest stages. Weaver says they haven't developed anything that would enable a miniature drone to follow a person around a room and are still in the process of deducing exactly how to give these tiny quadcopters autopilot capabilities. Once Weaver and his students give their five Crazyflies the power to fly on their own they'll still need to develop software required to get the nanodrones to move as a swarm and solve problems — like, in some future situation, figuring out if embers from a rowhouse fire have spread to other houses.

"We're not making anything that's going to turn into the movie Transcendence any time soon," Weaver says.

Put differently: No need to panic about HK-Drones popularized in the Terminator movies ... yet.