In 1998, aircraft designer Paul MacCready gave a live demo of his two-ounce unmanned surveillance drone on the TED stage in Monterey. “You see what it sees. Imagine you’re a fly,” he told the assembled audience, who watched the drone’s footage projected onto the screen in front of them. (The moment is captured in the […]
Here, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week. First, happy (late) World Poetry Day! Celebrate the occasion with 8 talks from spoken-word poets. Just when you thought Vijay Kumar’s robots that fly and cooperate were creepy enough, he and his team have developed a drone that can […]
Everything is a remix, Kirby Ferguson told us at TEDGlobal 2012, explaining that the essence of creativity is the welding together of others’ ideas to form something new. We couldn’t help but think of this when we saw an article on TheVerge.com about researchers at Zhejiang Univeristy’s CCNT lab who have combined brainwave technology and airborne robotics […]
Here’s the third talk from TED2012 (still going on). Yestrday, Vijay Kumar wowed the TED audience with his (and his team’s) flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams, and he premiered a very special music video — created specially for TED — which has gone viral less than a […]
Photo: James Duncan Davidson Welcome to Autonomous Agile Aerial Robots i.e. flying robots that can move like anything. Vijay Kumar, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, makes robots related to unmanned airplanes. But those are big and heavy and aren’t autonomous — they need humans to pilot them. The robots he works with are tiny. […]