The annual TED festival in California unleashed another collection of ideas, from how to transform medicine to why we should learn to be alone.
In his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams — for construction, surveying disasters and far more. Vijay Kumar studies the control and coordination of multi-robot formations.
Yesterday at the TED2012 conference in Long Beach, his swarm of autonomous robots, developed at the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrated their ability as flying musicians by performing the James Bond theme song.
The robots move around the room to play different instruments. Each quadrotor has been assigned a series of points in space that it must reach at specific times to play notes. But the robots decide themselves which routes to take between the different locations. To help them out, infrared lights and cameras track reflectors on their bodies and wirelessly relay their position to the other robots.
