Long Beach, California—Vijay Kumar's videos have already been a hit on YouTube, as people have been fascinated to watch swarms of robotic quadrotors perform various feats, like flying through narrow windows and coasting across a room in formation. But Kumar still had a few tricks up his sleeve when he took the stage at TED, and he seized the opportunity to show some serious ways in which aerial robots will change our world.

Some could say that aerial robots are already making a huge impact, primarily in military applications where (very) remote humans often pilot drones in hostile territories.

Kumar, however, envisions aerial robots that can fly themselves and carry out their tasks, on their own, or with minimal human input beyond initial design and programming. His drones offload even more of the job of stabilizing their flight to computers that aren't even on-board the copter (a weight and complexity advantage). Once airborne, the entire flight is computer-controlled.

The copters themselves are very stripped down. In most of the versions shown so far, they simply carry a sensor that lets them know where they are and how they are oriented in space, and remote-controlled hardware for adjusting their four rotors. All the heavy lifting—figuring out where to go and how to maintain a stable flight around obstacles—is done by computers that communicate with them wirelessly.

That's enough to get the robots to do things like right themselves when thrown, but Kumar's team has recently added a higher level of control that lets the robots swarm. In this case, there are added rules that are a bit like the ones that appear to govern bird flocks and fish schools—stay a fixed distance from your neighbors, split from the one on the left under a specific set of conditions, etc. This level of control enabled a swarm of robots to execute a hypnotic figure-eight without any collisions. More practically, Kumar showed teams of robots lifting items that an individual copter couldn't handle, and a swarm constructing a simple structure from parts left sitting on a nearby table.

But the ultimate goal of this work only became obvious when Kumar showed how he had built a quadrotor that carried a stripped-down version of Microsoft's Kinect hardware. Instead of being limited to a carefully controlled environment, these robots could enter an unknown building and gradually map their surroundings. Feedback from the control computer would have the robot move and orient itself to fill in blank spaces on the map, maneuvering into new rooms and heading through the structure vertically as needed.

The utility of something like this—mapping a potentially hazardous environment without risking a human (or even very expensive hardware) was pretty obvious, even if Kumar didn't spend time on it. He didn't even mention the other obvious step, which was having a swarm of these robots cooperate to map a building that much faster.

The talk wrapped up with Kumar suggesting that the robots could help lure kids into science/technology careers, and showed off a swarm of quadrotors playing the James Bond theme on a set of instruments that looked like they were borrowed from the latest OK Go video. It was a fun touch (and great that he brought the grad students who programmed it out on stage). But I'd suspect that kids would be just as excited about the demo of the robot mapping the building, and it's one that has a lot more in the way of potential applications.