Researchers Create Amazing Nano Quadrotor Robots that Fly in Unison

In a display of engineering brilliance, a team of research engineers have created what they call the Nano Qudrotor, which translated, means tiny helicopter with four rotors, that can fly in formation. Endgadget describes them as "four bladed aerial ninjas" and anyone who watches them in the video the team has posted on YouTube, will almost certainly agree. Not only can they be precisely controlled, but because they are also connected to a smart processor, they can be made to perform their aerial gymnastics in unison.

The team is made up of members of Pennsylvania University's GRASP group, which stands for General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory. This new subproject is called Scalable sWarms of Autonomous Robots and Mobile Sensors (SWARMS) which is clearly an apt description.

The individual qudrotor robots are actually little more than four rotors sitting on top of a microprocessor. Sensors on the bot read current conditions such as balance and speed and send that information to the microprocessor which then calculates changes to be made to keep the craft stable. Those signals are then sent to the individuals rotors tell to them to speed up or slow down.

To get the group of qudrotors to move in unison, the team preprogrammed the path each needs to take, then recorded it for each bot. Then, the recorded information is relayed from all of the bots at once to a central processor which controls all the bot together.

The bots in action bear an eerie resemblance to the Cylon craft in the most recent Battlestar Galactica series, which may portend their eventual actual use. Though the research is partly government funded, it's not being designed for military applications. Though watching the little qudrotors perform their feats, it's not hard to imagine larger versions doing the same in the gravity defying outstretches of space.

What's perhaps at least as impressive is the ability of the individual aircraft to find its way after being simply tossed into the air by one of the research engineers. In so doing, they give the impression of being slightly alive, like a bee or a bird.

According to Endgadget, the goal of the SWARMS team is to reproduce the swarming abilities of bees and other insects because they believe that doing so will lead to all sorts of breakthroughs in engineering, computer science and of course, robotics. Thus, they hint, that the stuff their little swarm can do now, is only the beginning.