mini flying robot drones – SkyNet’s first baby steps?

It conjures up a rather frightening vision of a future where intelligent robots work in packs without the need for human intervention.

But scientists are developing robots which can ‘dock’ with each other  and fly together in a swarm.

Using infrared beams the drones are able to find each others’ location and connect with one another using magnets, completely autonomously.

n the flight is over, the robots are able to simply detach their magnetic docking system and separate and drop to the ground where they can drive away.

Even if the robots were attacked they are able to detach from each other and then find one another and reform on the ground.

If the array’s level flight is disturbed, each vehicle individually determines the amount of thrust required to correct for the disturbance based on its own position.

While it is only a research project at the moment the ‘Distributed Flight Array’ can, in theory, be scaled up to contain any number of individual robots.

- [source]