Raffaello D’Andrea, CEO and founder of Verity, discusses building dependable autonomous robots and using small drone fleets for live entertainment and industrial sensing at Sony WOW Studio during SXSW.
D’Andrea traces a shift from people entering data, to automatically collected data, to systems that sense, compute, and act on their own. He says even a small difference in reliability can have a large effect on safety and operating costs. At Kiva Systems, early mobile robots averaged 24 hours between failures, so the team designed the warehouse system to handle faults and improve through learning and adaptation.
D’Andrea describes moving from bulky early drones to the Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich, where his team explored autonomous flight. Verity, founded in 2014, brought that work into real-world settings. Its lightweight Lucy drones use indoor positioning, coordinated flight, and customizable costumes for new kinds of visual expression.
D’Andrea says public performances force the team to make its systems robust under pressure. Verity has flown nearly 100 Lucy drones at China’s CCTV New Year’s Gala and worked with artists and venues including Drake, Metallica, and the Knicks. He reports more than 100,000 flights and over 2,000 shows, while aiming to scale Lucy performances from 50 drones to as many as 200.
Asked about audience safety, D’Andrea describes Verity’s approach to tolerating any single failure, including a propulsion failure. In a demonstration, a quadcopter keeps flying after one motor is disabled; Verity plans to license the software upgrade to other manufacturers. He also envisions drones carrying cameras, temperature or humidity sensors, and RFID readers to places inside warehouses where fixed equipment is unavailable or inconvenient.
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Raffaello D’Andrea, Verity co-founder and ETH Zurich professor, tells The Robot Brains Podcast’s Peter about autonomous warehouse drones, Kiva Systems, and his research and creative work.
