Comment by Emile L. on September 5, 2012 at 6:33am

Here is the video:

http://gizmodo.com/5940510/watching-49-quadrocopters-fly-and-swarm-...

Comment by Andy Grose on September 5, 2012 at 7:05am

That was pretty slick, no doubt.  I was hoping to hear what 50 quads sounded like...

Distributor Comment by Dany Thivierge on September 5, 2012 at 10:04am

Very nice! wow... I wonder if they had any collision? you can see there is some quads that stay on the ground when they take off.. 

Any specs? 

This is what the link says:

50 AscTec Hummingbird quadrocopters were used for the world premiere. This aircraft has already proven its reliability in many task areas. “The AscTec Hummingbird has outstanding flight attitude and position control, which was an important prerequisite not only because of safety concerns with a performance with thousands of spectators in the middle of the city,” said Daniel Gurdan, one of the four founders of Ascending Technologies. “In addition, we were excited about the creativity and the artistic aspect of this project.” In order to allow the Ars Electronica team to create computerized choreography, the company equipped the miniature helicopters with special radio receivers and slightly modified firmware. Otherwise, the quadrocopter, with a take-off weight of only 500 grams, was simply a standard model.

Moderator Comment by Gary Mortimer on September 5, 2012 at 11:58am

All I know is I have been lucky enough to fly and see a Falcon 8 being flown many times and its a great platform that really does what it says it does. I have also seen the guys give some pretty amazing demos as well.

Comment by Jack Crossfire on September 5, 2012 at 6:01pm

Wonder if they had 50 pilots standing by. GPS & air pressure being what they are, it took a lot of timelapse to make the video bearably fast enough.  They still had to get all the flying under 10 minutes.  Wish they picked a more durable theme than the cloud in the web.  Is anyone going to care about the cloud in a year, any more than they care about myspace now?

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