More goodness from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL in Switzerland: 10 Zagi-style UAVs autonomous flocking at the same time. From the write-up:
Designing swarm controllers is typically challenging because no obvious relationship exists between the individual robot behaviors and the emergent behavior of the entire swarm. For this reason, we turn to biology for inspiration.
In a first approach, artificial evolution is used for its potential to automatically discover simple and unthought-of robot controllers. Good evolved controllers are then reverse-engineered so as to capture the simple and efficient solutions found through evolution in hand-designed controllers that are easy to understand and can be modeled. Resulting controllers can therefore be adapted to a variety of scenarios in a predictable manner. Furthermore, they can be extended to accommodate entirely new applications. Reverse-engineered controllers demonstrate a variety of behaviors such as exploration, synchronization, area coverage and communication relay.
Comments
Otherwise such a grant would imbalance the actual social system giving too much of an advantage to the researcher compared to a local organisation of wine makers.
30% R&D payoff (ongoing all the time, big companies have this around 5-8%)
20% database, documentation, regression testing (big companies have this at 50%)
10% assembly and flight test
10-15% fixed payments and tooling
10-20% income
10% spare parts/surplus/storage for mfg continuity
30% Taxes (big companies in EU have refunding here)
And those are STEADY STATE expenses.
if you add to this platform development, you could easily double the total.
If I had to guess:
$1000 for parts
$1000 for putting them together
$1000 to recoup R&D
$1000 pure retail profit
$5000 justify's the risk of selling a product that can get you sued?
I mean realistically: the market price is as much as you can charge that the customer will still pay. So long as these vendors have something unique to offer: they can name their own price.
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