Swarms of Autonomous Flying Robots

MIT's Jonathan How and his grad students Brett Bethke and Mario Valenti have managed to design and build an actual flock of autonomous flying robots that coordinate their actions.

The craft are pretty neat in and of themselves, complete with sensors, adaptive control, and inertial guidance on top of the quad-rotor design. And their independent cooperation promises some really interesting future missions around surveillance, support, and rescue applications. Until Cyberdyne Systems mounts weapons on them and Terminators descend from the sky anyway.

Notice that they are already surrounded by flying aircraft and are holding up their hands in surrender.

Seriously though, coordinated autonomous flying is definitely high cool.