A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors: The flying robot video you absolutely must watch

As you watch the video below you can form your own conclusions about this natural evolution of robotics. But I’ll give you some of my opinions below the video:

http://youtu.be/YQIMGV5vtd4

Now some context:

  • As a technologist I would like to remind you all that every future use case for incredibly capable systems like this will involve IT with moving parts, and all IT with moving parts requires IT guys to fix them when they break. So guess what CIOs, increasingly you are going to be the person that is turned to for robot repair.
  • Most use cases for devices like this involve sensors. For example, swarms like this could be sent into disaster areas to look for survivors of a disaster, or could be sent into an area to sense the environment. There are so many other use cases involving sensors. Which means, this evolution of robotics will add even more data to overloaded systems. So we are looking at yet another reason enterprise IT professionals need to study Apache Hadoop.
  • These things are built with some smarts in the devices themselves and some smarts external and they all communicate with each other via networks. I have not conducted a security assessment on these and don’t know anyone who has, but I can tell you from experience there are ways for bad guys to get into the network. Don’t think f0r a second that you can trust these flying robots to always be under the control of their designer.


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Jerry Rhoads

I am so thinking Battle Star Galactica here!

Seriously, I would venture to say CIO shops will need to repair the robots in the beginning, however as they get commoditized –they break and you throw them away. Furthermore, I can see Hadoop for the storage of the data they process and store in their cloud minds –maybe an Isilon Scalable NAS for that! Lastly, a destruct button incase the thing goes BSG Cylon on us!