Shots ring out, and seconds later two gun-wielding men crash through the doors of a convenience store in downtown Los Angeles. A police helicopter is in the area, but what are the odds it can be alerted and arrive in time to track the fleeing criminals?
Fortunately, smart cameras with gunshot detection systems populate this high-risk neighborhood. Two cameras recognize the gunshot and instantly swivel to follow the fugitives. They simultaneously trigger an alert, which tells the helicopter precisely where the suspects are and in what direction they are heading.
Here is where the scene takes a fork in the road you have seldom seen, even in a Hollywood movie.
The helicopter, all eleven inches of it, alerts all the other helicopters in the area. There are about 200. True to their name, they swarm towards the fugitives.
From the ground, it looks like a swarm of bees is descending from the heavens above to sting the evil pair. But the copters do not attack, they merely pursue, hovering ten to 100 feet above their targets and following their every movement.
Panicked, the men fire wildly at the swarm. They hit one copter, destroying it, but that does not impact the swarm. If one copter goes down, the others adjust. The swarm is still a functioning network.
The men duck into an abandoned warehouse, and the swarm splits. Some follow into the building, others surround it from all sides and above. All the while, they communicate with each other. Unless they have 200 bullets, perfect aim, and all the time in the world, they have no hope of escaping.
The copters serve as a homing beacon, and armed police soon surround the building. The men surrender quickly, spooked by their inhuman pursuers.
The copter swarm I describe is based on work being done at the University of Essex in England, where researchers have a concept known as Ultraswarms. They have constructed miniature helicopters, designed to fly indoors, that communicate with each other via Bluetooth and use Linux to perform parallel processing operations. This scenario is some ways off, but it is beginning to appear plausible.
The picture here shows their early prototype helicopter. The file shown on the screen is being sent to the screen from the helicopter via a Bluetooth link. The researchers say this helicopter is the smallest flying web server in the world.
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