Drones Rearrange This Canopy Prototype So You're Always in the Shade

When they're not rebuilding the environment or exploring Mars, the drones of the future may help us avoid some of life's minor inconveniences. A group of masters students at the University of Stuttgart envisioned a fleet of drones that does just that for their thesis project: As New Atlas reports, the drones are part of a roaming canopy, responding to sunlight above and movement below to ensure you're always in the shade.

Without the drones, the prototype, dubbed Cyber Physical Macro Material, resembles a normal stationary structure. Tall black poles support panels that fit together magnetically, protecting whoever's beneath them from the sun's rays. But this design is only effective when the sun is in a certain part of the sky: As the day progresses, the canopy's shadow shifts, and people are forced to move with it if they want to stay out of the light.

But these panels don't stay in the same spot for long. They come equipped with special sensors that keep track of the orientation of the sun and a communications system that corresponds with autonomous drones nearby. If a panel is no longer keeping the ground beneath it shady, a drone will glide over, lift it up, and snap it into a different part of the canopy like a puzzle piece. Drones can also rearrange the panels in response to the size and location of the crowd beneath them, which means the same structure that shades a few pedestrians can also keep a larger party cool.

There are legal and logistical hurdles the project would need to overcome before becoming a system in a real-world, but the researchers behind it say that for now it's meant to get people thinking about the potential applications for drones. A press release from the university reads, "With its ability to continuously reconstruct during use, the system challenges pre-conceived ideas of robotic digital fabrication and sophisticated pre-fabrication for architecture."

You can see how the drone-powered canopy works in the video below.

Cyber Physical Macro Material as a UAV Configurable Architectural System from ICD on Vimeo.