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LONG BEACH, Calif. -- The machines have won – at least when it comes to being able to play music better than a Mashable editor.
While that might not be saying much in my case, the music video that debuted at the TED conference on Wednesday showing flying, autonomous robots playing a coordinated version of the James Bond theme song was by any account an impressive technological achievement.
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The video was the culmination of a presentation by The University of Pennsylvania’s Deputy Dean for Education Vijay Kumar, who showed off recent advances in robotics and gave the audience a primer in how they work.
Called quadrotors, the flying robots are designed to mimick the swarming behaviors of birds, fish and insects and operate completely autonomously from human control. Instead, they are controlled by a computer that communicates with the robots, infrared lights and cameras.
A blog post by Evan Lerner at The University of Pennsylvania further explains how this works:
The “stage” is in a room fitted with infrared lights and cameras. The nano quads all have reflectors on their struts, which allows the camera system to plot their exact position and relay that information wirelessly to each unit.
Lab members can then assign each unit a series of waypoints in three-dimensional space that must be reached at an exact time. In this case, those times and places translate into notes on a keyboard or a strum of a guitar. Figuring out how to get from waypoint to waypoint most efficiently and without disturbing their neighbors is up to the robots.
While for the moment, the quadrotors may seem like science fiction, Kumar talked of practical applications on the horizon in areas like first response and construction work. For now though, you can see the wonder of his music-playing robots in the video above.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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