Meet the dazzling flying machines of the future

When you hear the word “drone,” you most people often think of something either very handy or either something very scary.

“For a system to function autonomously, it must collectively know the location of its mobile objects in space … For the demos you will see today, we will use new localization technology developed by Verity Studios. There are no external cameras. Each flying machine uses onboard sensors to determine its location in space and onboard computation to determine what its actions should be. The only external commands are high-level ones such as take off and land.” D’Andrea

But could drones have aesthetic value? Autonomous systems expert Raffaello D’Andrea develops flying machines, and some of his latest projects are pushing the limits of autonomous flight. Everything from a flying fixed wing that is able to hover and also recover from disturbance to an 8-propeller air craft that is ambivalent to orientation, and even a a swarm of small coordinated florescent micro quadcopters.

Raffaello D’Andrea;s talk below was presented at a TED conference in Vancouver, British Columbia in February 2016. He dazzled the audience with several swirling flying machines that memorized people as they hovered around the TED stage.