Drones dropping marshmallows on Pakistan, fluffy white clouds landing and turning red, soaked with blood.
“Barack Obama has killed more people with drones than all the other Nobel Prize winners combined”
Cool, terrifying
A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors
A robotics research team at the University of Pennsylvania has designed a system to coordinate a number of small quadcopters, a step toward coordinating multiple robots for tasks such as surveillance or searching areas after a disaster. The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) lab at UPenn yesterday posted a video on You Tube with nano quadcopters showing remarkable agility and ability to perform as a team. The quadcopters are able to flip over and maintain flight. More amazing (unnerving?) is their operation in formation. Based on commands, 16 quadcopters change direction, land, navigate past obstacles, and even fly in a figure eight formation. Coordinating the action of multiple robots is one of the big technical challenges in robotics research now. Small robots, such as these nano quadcopters, could be well suited for certain missions but people need methods for programming small, inexpensive robots in large groups rather than manually configuring each one.
(via Nano quadrotor robots assemble and roll out (video) | Cutting Edge - CNET News)
Abdullah M. I. Syed
THE FLYING RUG OF DRONES (Ed. of 3)
2009
Box-cutter knife blades and stainless steel
48 x 96 in.
(Thank you, RKSTNI)
(Source: aicongallery.com)
Sex tape leaks from drones operated by voyeuristic pilots. Everyone watches me weeping naked in the bath, skin camouflaged white porcelain.
may flights of drones guard over us while we sleep
Dreamt I was outside my body. I was lying in a field and all my clothes had been singed off. There was a tattoo of a drone on my thigh.
Woke up with a drone in my bed. Over the radio a remote pilot asked me, “You don’t remember my name, do you?”
(credit to unfiltered and hungryghoast for tweets linked in that order)
See also.for this week’s True for Tuesday, let’s learn about drones! Above, a drone poem!
For other drone truths, consult an oracle! Just follow my handy How-To:
In the pitch-dark close your eyes tight and imagine a wealthy gentleman’s club with leather seats, invisible servants, want for nothing and the undeniable smell of copious amounts of grain alcohols. This is the Spirit Drone Home. Begin to invoke the names of drones in a chant like so (sometimes aided by ingesting Methedrone or Mephedrone), “Predator Batmav Gnat. Wasp Sentinal DarkStar. Hummingbird ShadowBell EagleEye. Hunter GrayEagle Pioneer Hunter Reaper.” Open your eyes and an avatar of the Great Spirit Of All Drones will appear before you, if you’re lucky it’ll take the shape of one of the not-yet-to-be-launched-but-dear-in-the-hopes-and-aspirations-of-many-a-military-general-cum-political-power-with-looming-heart-disease ones like the Cormorant:
(note: the Cormorant is a surveillance drone, but even then it is up to the discretion of the drone avatar itself whether to bring along flaming piles of rubble into your drone vision quest)
You may ask the drone any couple questions you want that don’t pertain to the drone’s own existence. Some tips and tricks:
- Do not allude the fact that “drones” by definition live off the work of others and that the robots we refer to as drones do plenty of “work” while the actual Drones, the powerful weapons company executives for example, continue to profit.
- Similarly, do not ask questions about bees, wasps, or ants. Unmanned Systems are sensitive about their lack of reproductive organs and their inability to procreate (thus far). However, they will discuss with great excitement the potential of the swarm.
- while in the presence of the drone try to steer clear of crowds. or thinking about crowds. the drone is easily confused into violence.
- To hear a drone laugh, use the word “threnody” correctly in a sentence. Example: “The musicians at the funeral intensified their soothing threnody from a murmur to a hum to much more until it all crescendoed with the crashing of the bombs.” The drone laugh is said to be one of the most horrifying sounds accidentally created by man.
- You’ll know it is the last question you are allowed to ask because the response will come in the form of a hum, a deep resonating note played over the Devil’s Fiddle and like all aural drones the sound drums from deep inside you as well as all around. And then a thing you don’t hear at all and only feel. And then a bright light. And then a new rush of sounds. And then….
