You probably went about your day not worrying about the robot apocalypse, didn't you? Well, time to get your head out of the clouds, human! Robots, as anyone who watches the thoughtful programming on SyFy knows, are getting smarter every day, due increasingly to their own intelligence.
The latest evidence of robot momentum comes from a recent TED conference in California. In a video premiered there by Dr. Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania, a corps of flying robots fitted with wires navigate between a keyboard, percussive instruments, and a hacked “guitar” built from a couch frame to play a recognizable theme song. It's crazy:
These flying robots, or quadrotors, are yet another creation of U Penn's GRASP lab (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception), where last month quadrotors flew in menacingly perfect formation. According to GRASP's YouTube channel, the Bond-playing quadrotors are "completely autonomous." Here's a direct quote that's fun if you imagine one of the robots wrote it:
“Humans are not controlling them. They are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.”
CNET reports that GRASP's research is aimed at fields of surveillance and disaster-relief, which makes these badass musician robots heroes as well.