Facilities
The Aerodrome:
- The tallest indoor drone arena of its kind, covering more than 1,500 square feet and 41 feet high.
- It includes a custom-built 10-foot-by-10-foot wall of 1,296 fans capable of generating wind speeds of up to 35 mph, with a side wall of 324 fans to create a crosswind. The wall is capable of creating a nearly infinite variety of wind conditions for drones to learn to react to—everything from a light gust to a stormy vortex, simulating the real-world conditions that flying autonomous aircraft may encounter.
- The entire wall can also be tilted 90 degrees to simulate vertical take-offs and landings. The space is monitored by 48 cameras that track the motion of drones with a resolution of 100 microns.
The Assembly Room:
- A 1,200-square-foot room with work benches and a modular design for flexibility of set-up. The room includes an 85-foot-long oval track for walking robots, where researchers can design and test out new gaits.
Aerospace Robotics and Control Laboratory:
- A 2,300-square-foot lab featuring a spacecraft fabrication space with a clean room and a spacecraft motion simulation facility with a high-precision flat floor, with imperfections smaller than a thousandth of an inch. This allows researchers to fly "spacecraft" that have been engineered to hover through high-pressure jets (like a reverse air hockey table) and simulate the frictionless motion of space flight on a two-dimensional plane.
- A 2,500-square-foot lab equipped with multiple tracks—both circular and straight—for walking robots and a custom, 15-foot-long treadmill capable of reaching speeds of up to 40 miles per hour. The floor of the facility includes multiple types of surfaces for robots to traverse, such as grass and spongy gym floor.
