Students at the GRASP (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception) Lab at the University of Pennsylvania have succeeded in training flying helicopters to assemble simple structures. These flying robots buzz like bees, they collaborate like bees, and the structures that they build are regular and defined largely by physical constraints than some innate construction knowledge. These bee-copters may be dumb compared to the intellect of 30,000 grass seed sized bee brains but the video is pretty impressive anyway.

Video after the jump…

Now if they could get these quadrotor copters to run on flower nectar, then they might have something. Harvesting solar energy might not be such a stretch, however. Imagine what mini-copters could be doing in 10 years?