This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
These machines don't just fly -- they can do a choreographed dance in time to music. The system, known as Music in Motion, was designed by engineer Federico Augugliaro and his team at ETH University, Zurich, over the last two years. "Right now we can manually generate a choreography timed to music," says Augugliaro. "The next step is to program the quadcopters so they are able to generate their own choreography to any music played."
The process involves analysing a piece of music and extracting each beat. "We have developed software that lets us script a dance," Augugliaro says. "For example, we can say, from beat one to ten, we want vehicle one to perform a circle with a given radius, and vehicle two to perform a swing." The algorithm also has to compute the trajectory of each vehicle so they don't collide mid-air. The machines have danced to popular music such as the
Pirates of the Caribbean tune "Up in the Sky", but for their most recent performance, called "Dance of the Flying Machines", the team of researchers composed their own music for the drones to move to. "You may think we are limited in a sense without human dancers' arm and leg movements, but when you are off the ground, you can exploit all of space."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
