whooaaaa flying robots!?! This is amazing.. although it freaks some people out.

Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics


For some people, flying robots are a dream; for others, they are a nightmare from a dystopian sci-fi novel. Whichever camp you fall in, you’ll probably appreciate a video showing flying machines performing some pretty advanced maneuvers.


A flying nano quadrotor (a multicopter that is lifted and propelled by four rotors) is quite cool by itself, but, as the video above shows, things become really interesting when several such machines join to create a flying swarm.


The folks from the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, have been working on several projects that include autonomous vehicles and autonomous robots working together as a group.


“The challenge is to design systems, which exhibit a goal-driven behavior, while sensing and reacting to changing environment,” says GRASP in its description of the Autonomous Aerial Vehicles project.


Another project called SWARMS (Scalable sWarms of Autonomous Robots and Mobile Sensors) tries to understand and apply swarming behaviors in nature to large networked groups of autonomous vehicles


courtesy of Mashable