Quadrotor technology developed at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab at the University of Pennsylvania is able to fly with better accuracy than anything we’ve seen to date. Their ability to run complicated formations is both beautiful and terrifying. The beauty is obvious. They may sound like bugs and look exceptionally creepy as they do flips and run tight formations (the figure-8 is amazing), but they are “geek beautiful” in ways that few robotic devices have achieved. They are terrifying because the possibilities are endless. When possibilities are…

In the movies, it always start innocently. They are designed to help humans, to do the mundane or difficult tasks that are better suited for non-sentient robots rather than men and women. In the end, they always turn on us. Hopefully, the folks at the Swiss Federated Institute of Technology in Zurich are keeping that in mind as they develop the system for the Flying Machine Enabled Construction project. The video below displays where they are as of now in this first public demonstration: “The installation, called “Flight Assembled Architecture”, was conceived and built by teams led by my colleagues…