VOA常速英语:无人机或便捷人类日常生活

Instead of scaffolding around big buildings, imagine a swarm of drones methodically doing all kinds of chores, from cleaning windows to looking for problems and performing simple maintenance. Researchers from England and Switzerland have programmed these drones to do just that by adding a simple anchor and tether. So it places this anchor, and then pulls back to tighten the string, and then uses an admittance controller to lower itself down to perch in a completely vertical position. By doing then, this mobility allocating the string, you can move up and down and like this assess, repair, and sense or sample the surface. But these researchers are looking way past buildings, and they see a world where drones are crawling across all kinds of giant structures from tunnels to subways to mines. The drones would routinely monitor the structures, and once identify any abnormality or any potential damage, they would go closer perch to the structure to the inspection tasks and if needed, they would even send repair agents that will go there and do the repair tasks.

Not only are these drones able to continuously monitor big structures, but having them around means conducting routine assessment and maintenance won’t have to be a costly production. For example, today there is the tendency to build scaffolding or to use helicopters to do various assessment tasks, and really the question is how can we provide robotic systems that we do a lot of those tasks much faster, in a much more adaptive, much more reactive way.
As always, the fear is that robots will take away human jobs, but these researchers say drones are just another tool, not a replacement for people. Drones still have negative connotations in some discussions, but I think it is important that we show how they can support normal workflows, how they can support humans in their day-to-day jobs to make their life easier, less dangerous while at the same time reducing cost of operation. The research team took their inspiration from the natural world, watching house spiders move up and down their webs.
Kevin Enochs, VOA News.