Watch A Flock Of Drone Butterflies Flutter Around [Video]

Complex machines mimic simple beings

Festo is building a mechanical menagerie. The German industrial design firm specializes in bio-inspired robots, which may find a use in future factories, like these exoskeletal gloves or this elephant-inspired robotic arm. Others are more whimsical, like this flying, floating, jellyfish-inspired robot that Festo held a contest to find practical uses for. And sometimes they’re both practical and whimsical, like these hand-sized swarming cyber-ant-bots that could someday clean factory floors.

Festo’s latest is a gorgeous flock of butterfly-like robots. The ten butterflybots fly not on their own but as part of a system built into the room, with ten cameras watching the robots and feeding their location data back into a central computer that coordinates their movements. It’s a sterile sort of beauty, like the future’s version of a colorful and inoffensive sculpture in the lobby of a bank’s corporate headquarters.

 

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Kelsey D. Atherton Avatar

Kelsey D. Atherton

Contributor, Tech

Kelsey D. Atherton is a military technology journalist who has contributed to Popular Science since 2013. He covers uncrewed robotics and other drones, communications systems, the nuclear enterprise, and the technologies that go into planning, waging, and mitigating war.