A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors--WHOA!

[morningfog]

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[tridim]

1. Neat!

I assume they communicate with each other?

[TheWraith]

5. I'm thinking more likely they're controlled by a central computer.

Putting enough processing power on board to do collision avoidance might weigh them down and eat battery life.

[tridim]

6. If you watch closely they self-correct individually.

It's really the most efficient way to guage location relative to each other. There are too many variables for a computer to keep track of. A computer could keep them in sync, but not in perfect formation.

[cliffordu]

2. Oh, fuck.

whoever controls the military version of these runs the world.

[tridim]

3. Except they can be stopped with a 10 dollar fish net.

[TheWraith]

4. Also, they won't be able to fly very far.

Hovering like that is going to take a lot of power, and I doubt even the densest lithium-ion battery could keep those things going for more than fifteen minutes or so.

And every added bit of weight, such as a camera, is going to reduce that.

[cliffordu]

8. one camera on the "mothership" the rest are just

little tiny drones, coming for the kill....

[cliffordu]

7. Unless there are 25,000 of them coming from 360 degrees.....

All they have to do is load them with a thimble of C4 each and you will never escape, net or no.

[HopeHoops]

9. Shit - reminds me of the "eye identification" spiders in "Minority Report".

I forget what they were called, but they acted very much like that.

[KansDem]

10. Why when I watch this video do I think of gnats?

[wandy]

11. Cool! I want a few. Then and again how does this work???

The nano quadrotors have been developed by KMel Robotics, but few specifics are known about their make up. The aggressive movement of the quadrotors is impressive, but it’s their ability to work autonomously and as a team that will get most people, and companies, excited.

My approch, for what it's worth, would be to give each one sensing ability and send the data back to a central CPU or CPU array for processing. You can get an ungodley amount of processor power these days. This would reduce weight and cordinate controle.

Except; I get the creapy feeling that each one is atonimus and is working in a sort of 'self aware' harmoney with it's peers to execuit one high level directive.

However it's done, it's slick.

[tridim]

12. Note the multiple video cameras surrouding the lab..

I think this solution is just using camera tracking, which makes it much less impressive IMO. They aren't autonymous at all. There are no tracking cameras in the real world and GPS probably isn't going to be nearly accurate enough.