Flying Robots Flip, Swarm and Move In Formation At UPenn

techgeek0279 writes "The University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory has released a video of flying nano quadrotor robots. Inspired by swarming habits in nature, these agile robots avoid obstructions and perform complex maneuvers as a group."

Re:Freakin awesome

[TheInternetGuy]

In fact they are probably so cheap that you only need to load them with plastic explosives and send your little swarm of kamikaze robots to rain down on your enemy. I cant put my finger on it, but there is something very angry birds about this.

Re:I want to see it scaled up.

[viperidaenz]

... because vertical flight is so much more energy efficent, cheaper and safer than rolling along the ground ...

Re:Note the cameras, lights, and antennas.

[Laser Dan]

Do you not realize that collision avoidance becomes rather more difficult when the things you're trying to avoid colliding with are themselves moving? They're not setting up a pattern to fly in, the computer is calculating trajectories for each robot such that they won't interfere with each other at any point in the future. A rather taller order.

What collision avoidance?
They are all externally controlled, and the controller knows their position to within a few mm due to the very expensive vicon system they are using.
All they are doing is moving along preplanned and precalculated trajectories.

As a robotics researcher I'm not really impressed.
External control and localisation removes 99% of of the difficulty of the problem.
It also makes this research useless for any actual real-world function, it's only good for fancy demos in their specially prepared room.
If they did that with only onboard sensors and control, THEN I would be impressed.