GRASP, General Robotics, & Swarming Drones

This truly fantastic video went around the interwebs last week, featuring the work of U Penn robotics lab, GRASP. Notably, the video shows groups of small quadrotors flying in formation, following paths, and generally exhibiting both autonomy and collective behavior.

Flush with defense moneys, the GRASP team are doing some pretty amazing work. A survey of their current projects could be the basis for hundreds of scifi novels yet many of them are right on the edge of reality. Research includes:

Haptography – haptic photography
Reasoning in reduced information space
HUNT – heterogenous unmanned networked teams
Omni-directional vision
SUBTLE – situation understanding bot through language & environment
Modular robotics lab
SWARMS – scalable swarms of autonomous robots and mobile sensors

Peep their published lab papers for even deeper FutureNow goodness, eg “Multi-vehicle path planning in dynamically changing environments”.