This Swarm of Flying Robots Will Terrify and Amaze You [VIDEO]

For some people, flying robots are a dream; for others, they are a nightmare from a dystopian sci-fi novel. Whichever camp you fall in, you'll probably appreciate a video showing flying machines performing some pretty advanced maneuvers.

A flying nano quadrotor (a multicopter that is lifted and propelled by four rotors) is quite cool by itself, but, as the video above shows, things become really interesting when several such machines join to create a flying swarm.

The folks from the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, have been working on several projects that include autonomous vehicles and autonomous robots working together as a group.

"The challenge is to design systems, which exhibit a goal-driven behavior, while sensing and reacting to changing environment," says GRASP in its description of the Autonomous Aerial Vehicles project.

Another project called SWARMS (Scalable sWarms of Autonomous Robots and Mobile Sensors) tries to understand and apply swarming behaviors in nature to large networked groups of autonomous vehicles.

In this particular project, the flying machines are shown flying in three-dimensional formations, navigating environments with obstacles and performing complex flight patterns.

The video will surely remind gamers with long memory (and sufficient age) of the legendary game Homeworld, one of the rare RTS games that let you control a group of spaceships in a completely free 3D environment. Check out one video from the game below and try to guess how long it'll take for flying robots to take over the world.