A swarm of micro-quadcopters

Very cool, but notice what kind of room they fly in - they're using cameras to control the quadcopters, they're not autonomous, which means that if you put them outside, they wouldn't work.<p>Still, pretty damn impressive.

Every time a see a new quadcopter video, I wonder to myself how long before local law enforcement starts using them.<p>I gratly fear a widely used, easily weaponized, remote controlled airforce that local enforcement officers can easily obtain.

I wonder when they will implement the flocking behavior we see with birds and in boid algorithms. ex <a href="http://processing.org/learning/topics/flocking.html" rel="nofollow">http://processing.org/learning/topics/flocking.html</a><p>Obviously their will need to be a collision penalty but one would think this kind of behavior would be easy to do.

I very much would love to set up a bunch of these quadrocopters to circle my house and use them as security cameras. I'm not sure how long it would take for that, but if you could set up something like 20 of these, have them continuously rotate around the house perimeter, recording everything, and then come back to recharge with another one taking off, I think that would be pretty awesome.

I enjoy how references to The Diamond Age are becoming more and more common in tech beloved by the hacker community. Increases my excitement for the future! I want my matter compiler already.

Anyone have some tips on the small components? Most of what I seem to find on the drone forums is about larger devices, maybe upwards of a foot and a half or two feet across.

I found that incredible, amazing, stunning but also hilarious for some reason. I don't know why but it funny seeing them all working together like that.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDmel" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDmel</a><p>The "Aggressive Manoeuvres" videos remind me of something out of terminator.

The same video was posted a while ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3542542" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3542542</a>