Via Boingboing:
The GRASP Lab at University of Pennsylvania made this video that shows off the "precise aggressive maneuvers" of an autonomous quadrotor helicopter. It flies through small windows, perches on walls, and nimbly flips over. I imagine there are quite a few applications for something like this.
Comments
Very funky, but why do I get teh feeling the battery life is approximately 10 seconds, or just long enough to do one of those clips...
Difficult to say. Although battery technology is lagging behind, great strides have been made in motors. If you imagine those little copters you can buy for 30 quid, their batteries last for ages. The process controller that is doing the calculations doesn't need to be running very fast so can be a low power RISC.
I think the applications for sending it into buildings is the best. Furthermore, this robot isn't autonomous.
This doesn't look that practical as anything other than a demonstrator at the moment IR tracking on all the objects is impractical in the wild setting up all those ir sources, reflectors, and cameras would be nigh on impossible unless this was in a closed environment.
Still impressive manoeuvring
A similar platform from MIT was pretty capable of using on-board sensors to navigate complex interior environments. I saw a video of it once, but now I can only find this news story. Nowhere near as impressively manoeuvrable, but we can't be more than a few years from highly manoeuvrable, fully autonomous flying robots that can hunt you down inside a building.
MANHACKS!
Something like that but autonomous is quite impressive. I mean the four rotor thing is essentially a drone with no smarts at all the processing to move it from A->B shows impressive programming skills but what's running that code could be anything up to rooms full of computers. Making something that can do complex navigation and carry it's own processors is nifty.