This Autonomous Quadrotor Swarm Doesn't Need GPS

The vast majority of the fancy autonomous flying we've seen from quadrotors has relied on some kind of external localization for position information. Usually it's a motion capture system, sometimes it's GPS, but either way, there's a little bit of cheating involved. This is not to say that we mind cheating, but the problem with cheating is that sometimes you can't cheat, and if you want your quadrotors to do tricks where you don't have access to GPS or the necessary motion capture hardware and software, you're out of luck. Researchers are working hard towards independent autonomy for flying robots, and we've seen some impressive examples of drones that can follow paths and avoid obstacles using only onboard sensing and computing. The University of Pennsylvania has been doing some particularly amazing development in this area, and they've managed to teach a swarm of of a dozen 250g quadrotors to fly in close formation, even though each one is using just one small camera and a simple IMU.