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Here’s the rest of the video with the STARMAC team. That’s Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control.

Geek translated: helicopters that can fly on their own.

This was filmed during our recent Photowalking at Stanford University. The team explains why one of these flipped over and attacked me. “It wants you dead,” was one explanation.

These are quadrotor helicopters that can fly remotely without much human assistance. Really cool research project that you’ll want to check out. Anyway, here you meet the team: Gabe Hoffmann, Ph.D. candidate, Aeronautics and Astronautics; Haomiao “H” Huang, Ph.D. candidate; Aeronautics and Astronautics; Steve Waslander, post doctoral scholar, Aeronautics and Astronautics; Vijay Pradeep, M.S. student, Mechanical Engineering and Mike Vitus, Ph.D. candidate, Aeronautics and Astronautics. They fly it around and explain what it is. By the way, in the video they said it costs $10,000 to build one of these. The team did more research and found out that you could build one for about $3,000 now.

Projects like these are inspirational and who knows where the things they are learning by building them will show up.

Thank you to Rocky Barbanica for the great editing on this (and the camera work too).

Thank you big time to Ian Hsu of Stanford University for setting this up.

Why do I say “Tim O’Reilly eat your heart out?” Because these are the kinds of things (and geeks) he’d love to have at Foocamp.