Every now and then the future arrives at your door, slaps you round the face with a sports almanac and tells you that it's happening right here, right now.
Like this video of flying robots playing the James Bond theme no real instruments. The University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) laboratory produces some of the US's most innovative robotics research.
These freaky little punks are designed by engineers Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev. They're robotic quadrotors programmed to play the James Bond Theme with the help of some modified instruments, and some nifty add-ons.
The robots were all pre-programmed to perform their individual maneuvers, which are carried out using a set up of infrared lights and cameras that track each quadrotor’s exact position in all three dimensions.
“Setting up the performance took about 36 hours, all done this past weekend,” says Kurtis Sensenig, the video’s producer, in an email to Digital Trends. “The final shots were done at 6am, after working for 20 hours straight setting it up.”
Vijay Kumar, a GRASP roboticist, presented the at the TED 2012 conference in Long Beach, California, as a demonstration of the lab’s innovative technologies.
Eat that, Q.
Image: Youtube
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