Little robot history. Everybody check out the following link and attempt to ignore the music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pbbJTTzNBU

That's Honda's ASIMO P1, circa 1993. Kinda looks like it could give the T1000 a run for its money, doesn't it? Big, threatening, lumbering, 6'2, 386 lbs of pure robot menace. If you look here:

http://asimo.honda.com/asimo-history/

...you'll notice that right after the P1, Honda PR staged an intervention with Honda R&D.

Now watch this video:

http://youtu.be/zul8ACjZI18

That's last year's ASIMO. You don't immediately notice that compared to the P1, it moves like a goddamn ninja. You don't immediately notice that the problems that plagued ED-209 it has handled. And you don't notice these things because Honda PR wisely pointed out that if you're going to create an autonomous cybersoldier capable of running at 6km/h and avoiding obstacles, it had best be the size and shape of an 8-year-old boy.

The GRASP lab isn't even about "robotics" in the same way Honda's ASIMO project is. They're interested in swarm dynamics - an interesting field that started at Los Alamos National Labs back in the late '80s. A number of clever ducks noted that the basic instructions necessary to model the flight of a flock of crows, for example, are far, far fewer than the basic instructions necessary to model the flight of a crow. Same with fish - a few simple Boolean statements and you can get really complex behavior out of a large number of specimens that you can't get out of one.

But that's not exactly "sexy."

Go look up "BEAM Robotics" on Google and see how many hits you get. You can even check the Wikipedia page and see if it seems similar to what's going on here. Now go look up "Skynet" and see how many hits you get.

I guess what I'm saying is this:

They don't have to paint the things black. I'm sure they'd argue that they show up better against a white sheet, but whatever. They'd show up better for their research purposes with IR emitters in a dark room anyway.

They don't have to scream like angry wasps as they fly around. Vary the blade pitch, vary the blade spacing and you could make the things sound like goddamn hummingbirds if you wanted to. I'm sure they'd argue that they're using the most efficient lift profile in order to maximize efficiency, but whatever.

They're totally leveraging the Internet's fascination with "killer robots." And they're fucking fun to watch. But keep in mind that for the purposes of the research being done, the GRASP lab would rather have those things the size of honeybees... and that a single Predator UAV will kill you much, much deader than a million of those things.

(I'm sure it's just a glitch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrXfh4hENKs)