Holiday Video: Cute Quadrocopter Hovers Above Piano, Picks Out ‘Jingle Bells’

Merry Christmas from the flying robots of Switzerland. Watch as a Swiss quadrocopter named “Echo” plays a little something for the holidays.

The robot is a test subject at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control. Researchers put a piano in their Flying Machine Arena so Echo could play “Jingle Bells.”

Researchers study high-performance flight, fast-changing flight maneuvers and other topics using the quadrocopters. The piano isn’t a new notion — one of the lab’s researchers, Angela Schöllig, spends her time synchronizing quadrocopters’ flight to music.

Watch to the end and you’ll see this wasn’t easy to do.

 

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Rebecca Boyle is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes about astronomy, zoonoses and everything in between. She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and her work regularly appears in Popular Science, New Scientist, FiveThirtyEight, Wired, and many other publications for adults and kids. Rebecca grew up in Colorado, a mile closer to space, and now lives in St. Louis, near the confluence of the continent's two mightiest rivers.