The UltraSwarm project, from the University of Essex, sounds really neat:
British researchers are turning to Linux and embedded processors to build a fleet of tiny, robotic helicopters capable of swarming like angry bees and evaluating their surroundings with a single hive mind.
But wait, there’s more:
If all goes according to plan, the helicopters will communicate with one another over Bluetooth, allowing them to move as one entity, and even to carry out sophisticated computation-heavy tasks using distributed computing techniques.
“We’ll have a flock of helicopters; they will be autonomous individually and as a swarm, and they will be gathering and processing visual data in distributed way,” says Owen Holland, project director and deputy head of the university’s computer science department.
If anyone is looking for birthday ideas, an intelligent swarm of robotic helicoptors is always a nice gift…
I can just about picture you with a swarm of helicopters hovering all around, ready and willing to do your bidding – albeit autonomously.
I’m a pretty big fan of anything that _autonomously_ does *my* bidding … 🙂