Wilbur Wright, flight around Statue of Liberty, 1909.
Look up in the sky and you will see neither bird nor plane but the future–it is here now. From Farhood Manjoo’s new Slate piece, “I Love You, Killer Robots“:
“It was way back in May 2010 that I first spotted the flying drones that will take over the world. They were in a video that Daniel Mellinger, one of the robots’ apparently too-trusting creators, proudly posted on YouTube. The clip, titled ‘Aggressive Maneuvers for Autonomous Quadrotor Flight,’ depicts a scene at a robotics lab at the University of Pennsylvania, though a better term for this den might be “drone training camp.”
In the video, an insectlike, laptop-sized ‘quadrotor’ performs a series of increasingly difficult tricks. First, it flies up and does a single flip in the air. Then a double flip. Then a triple flip. In a voice-over so dry it suggests he has no idea the power he’s dealing with, Mellinger says, ‘We developed a method for flying to any position in space with any reasonable velocity or pitch angle.’ What does this mean? It means the drone can fly through or around pretty much any obstacle. We see it dance through an open window with fewer than 3 inches of clearance on either side. Next, it flies and perches on an inverted surface—lying in wait.”
Tags: Farhood Manjoo