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From The Independent Media Channel

Drones That Fly, And Play Music

Professor Vijay Kumar, teaching in the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, calls them Autonomous Agile Aerial Robots or "Flying Quadrotors," also known to researchers as drones and UAV's. Kumar and his students have already attracted a big audience on YouTube.

Kumar researches the control and coordination of multi-robot formations and says there is much potential for aerial robots, to be sent inside buildings as first responders, to map out the 3D layout of a structure in real time, to search for intruders, to transport cargo.

In the video of his presentation at TED, Kumar explains the basis of his technology; the drones "live in a 12-dimensional space... We take this curved 12-dimensional space and transform it into a flat four-dimensional space." The robots have motion capture cameras that tell the robot where it is at 100 times per second. Surprisingly there is no GPS used in the technology. The motion capture cameras, along with a laser scanner, builds a real-time map of its environment, so there is no global coordinate system. The coordinate system is based on the robot, where it is, and what it is looking at.

Kumar says, "As an academic, we're always trained to be able to jump through hoops to raise funding for our labs, so now we get our robots to do that." Kumar finished the presentation and wowed the audience by playing a video of the drones performing music, from the James Bond movie themes, a project created by two of Kumar's students who orchestrated nine robots playing six instruments. It's fascinating to watch.

Links to Kumar’s YouTube videos: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vijay+kumar+robots&oq=vijay+kumar+robots&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=468l4998l0l5132l18l18l0l2l2l0l140l1321l13.3l16l0

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Echo Once His... Director: Shiloh Jenz

"The hardest part was peeling away these layers of fear..." Directed, Produced and Animated by Shilo Jenz, Music by Prospero's Ritual (Jez Velasquez & Lathan Lindsey,)

Echo Once His reminds us of wistful simplicity, fear and the unknown, looped over and over, then catapults us into a cyber-world of artificial reality of images created by the media and corporate branding. Here, our lives transforms into a spinning jerky assault on our senses by the unreal. The animated short poses questions that our culture asks in a larger sense - What is reality? Caught up in this world created by millions of distractions, only the determined can stop what is unreal and find a path to the world that is truly real. By simply turning our attention we create new realities. Prospero's Ritual sings, "The hardest part was peeling away these layers of fear..." - Mark Gould

Video Direction: Wormintruder Music: Prospero's Ritual (Jez Velasquez & Lathan Lindsey) Animation Sequences: WormWood Productions - Wormintruder & Sign69

http://wormintruder.com
http://sign69.com
http://aterriblemind.com

See the Independent Media Channel podcast on iTunes http://imediachannel.blip.tv/rss/itunes/ or in most other video/RSS players at http://imediachannel.blip.tv/rss

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