We'd always had an inkling that those cackling one-eyed cat lovers over at University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab were nefarious geniuses bent on world domination, and now we have proof.
Yes, that's the James Bond theme played by a swarm of nanoquads. This video premiered during the 2012 TED Conference, where Vijay Kumar (pictured above with one of the robots) was invited to give a talk. Those of us who were unlucky enough not to be invited to TED will have to wait for the video of the talk to be posted online, but you can at least feel a little bit smug that as a faithful reader of IEEE Spectrum, you're already very familiar with all the very cool stuff that the GRASP Lab has been doing with their quadrotors.
We should also mention that this isn't the first time that quadrotors have played the piano, although the harp-thing and the guitar are new (and quite clever). In December of 2010, a quadrotor named Echo from the Flying Machine Arena at ETH Zurich played jingle bells for the holidays all by herself. You can watch that performance below, and make sure you stick around until the very end of the video:
Awww!
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.