Flying Robots Flip, Swarm and Move In Formation At UPenn 122
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."
Link to the Upenn home page (Score:5, Interesting)
Cool stuff, but it needs a link to the home page: https://www.grasp.upenn.edu/ [upenn.edu]
Very cool (and creepy) crawler bot video on the homepage.
These flying bots remind me of you average Alaskan mosquito.
Re:Link to the Upenn home page (Score:5, Interesting)
UPenn does a LOT with these quad rotors. They seem to have some pretty smart grad students working on this in research.
One thing to point out is that this stuff doesn't always go as planned. Their Outtake Reel [youtube.com] is pretty entertaining from "Oops" to "Oh shit there goes another few propellers."
Re:Gonna find out who's naughty and nice (Score:4, Interesting)
The Constellation project is already working on using swarms of integrated drones working together to cover the entire battle space. The F-22 already has this capabilities. But there won't be swarms of F-22's because of the cost but integrating data with 5 to 10 jets is already a reality. Creating a swarm of drones adds redundancy and they are way cheaper than F-22's. The computing and parallel processing systems are what makes the the F-22 so lethal and while the F-35 does share a lot of technology with the F-22 it is mostly limited to the geometry and stealth capabilities. You can see the stealth features by analyzing pictures. The internal command and control systems can not be deduced from looking at a picture. The US does not sale F-22's to other countries for a reason.