Not too long ago, I was shown a video of these awesome little quadrotors, doing their thing at GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. The quadrotors did an array of interesting stunts, also demonstrating what appeared to be very complex swarm behavior, at one point, in a squadron of 20 robots. Swarm behavior is a form of biomimetics, taking a leaf of out the book of animal swarm intelligence, a phenomenon where large groups of animals, such as schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects, instinctively behave as a single unit. Large groups of robots, are programmed to work as a single unit, constantly trading information with each other in order to reassess their surroundings and readjust their actions.

The agility of these things, firstly, is quite amazing. But they way they work together just takes the cake.

And here’s another video showing the aggressive flying ability of these quadrotors. I clicked on it because I thought “aggressive” meant…maybe attaching a little machine gun onto it, or something, but alas, the video is still quite interesting.

Watching this brought fresh visions of the apocalyptic scenes we all saw in the Terminator movies, where autonomous flying drones flew around, zapping humans. And don’t forget, Man-Hacks, the pesky little blighters we kept at bay with a crowbar, in Half Life 2. But isn’t all negative…the possibilities for awesomeness are also very apparent, if not only from what we see in that video. Here’s another video of one of many interactive possibilities for these things, using a magic wand type controller:

I envision great things for something like this. Attach nice strong claws onto them, and you have a really cool beer-fetching robot team. Just hit a button or say a command, and off they go, to work as an awesome team and get you your beverage. Although, if they ever did attain sentience, I’d imagine they wouldn’t be keen to live a life of servitude and they’d revolt against you. And by then you might even be too lazy to put up a fight.