TED talks are always fun but this one looks more fun than average. It's about quadrotor based robots that play the James Bond theme.

If you have enjoyed any of the many videos of quadrotor robots doing amazing tricks then you will enjoy this talk because it gives you a complete overview of the project hosted at the GRASP lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

As well as being about the why, this particular talk covers the how of quadrotor flight works and why the smaller you make a flying robot the more agile it becomes and hence perhaps the more useful.

You will also find out some of the details of how the robots plan their flight paths and how they work together.  Understanding how it works makes you appreciate how clever the whole thing is.  If you are skeptical about the robots leaving the labs then the final section explains how, by carrying a Kinect depth sensor, robots can work out where they are by creating a map.

Of course the best is left till the end. The flying robots play the James Bond theme and they don't crash into one another.

More information

The work is by Quentin Lindsey, Daniel Mellinger, and Vijay Kumar at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania.

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