Written on July 7, 2008 – 9:04 am | by Bogdan Alex |
Who said humans don’t have the technology to build UFO’s? While the US Army (and other armies for that matter) are quick at dismissing the existence of such advanced technologies, a bunch of smart guys at Stanford University went ahead and developed some aircraft that move pretty similar to how UFOs appear to fly.

STARMAC is a multi vehicle test bed used to demonstrate new concepts in multi-agent control on a real-world platform. These quadrotor vehicles are able to fly both indoors and outdoors as well as carry computing and sensing resources sufficient for autonomous operations.

For the moment, the STARMAC quadrator aircraft can’t transport immense payloads, but it can easily accommodate computing resources such as a low level microcontroller board called the Robostix, the Gumstix Verdex for positive estimation and control, a PXA270 based single board computer and a PC-104 computer running Linux(Fedora) for onboard processing of vision information, optimal path planning and other high level automation tasks. According to Ubergizmo, this new type of vehicle will be used in real-world applications, with enough computing resources and excess lift capacity for special tasks that require extended autonomy. They sure look like they could pool some stealthy missions on their own. More info in the following clip: