Swarming Robots Will Fly Menacingly Towards Your Loved Ones In Perfect Formation

John Biggs

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

This video is making the nerd rounds today and it’s pretty amazing. It shows a set of quadrocopters first righting themselves after a catastrophic failure and returning to a certain point (the scientists throw the little guys into the air and they turn over and fly back to their hands light frightened starlings) and then we see how these monsters can fly in formation around obstacles and through windows.

Built by the GRASP Lab at U Penn, these wee robots keep getting cooler and smaller. These are part of the Scalable sWarms of Autonomous Robots and Mobile Sensors (SWARM) project that sounds like something Shredder used to find the Ninja Turtles in their watery redoubt.

The future: full of scary robots.