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Drone Swarm Lifts Truck - Not!
Pretty impressive sight, a swarm of drones lifting a truck!
2,000 #Drones pick up a 40-ton truck
— Ronald van Loon (@Ronald_vanLoon) April 9, 2020
by @ScaniaGroup#AI #IoT #ArtificialIntelligence #MI #InternetofThings #Robotics #Transport
Cc: @mikequindazzi @chr1sa @darpa @rom_duck @rethinkrobotics pic.twitter.com/sQ6JTLLWpT
Sounds like fake news to me, but human beings find the idea appealing. In fact, one of the very first novels that could reasonably be called science fiction, the 1638 work The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin, featured a trip into space courtesy of Gansas, great birds that lifted a small craft upwards:
It was now the season that these Birds were wont to take their flight away, as our Cuckoes and swallowes doe in Spaine towards the Autumne. They (as after I perceived) mindfull of their usuall voyage, even as I began to settle my selfe for the taking of them in, as it were with one consent, rose up, and having no other place higher to make toward, to my unspeakeable feare and amazement strooke bolt upright, and never did linne towring upward, and still upward...
The same idea is used by sf great Jack Vance in his Hugo award-winning novel The Last Castle.
...Xanten constrained six Birds to a lift chair, directed them first on a wide sweep around the castle, then south to Far Valley.The Birds aired their usual complaints, then bounded down the deck in great ungainly hops which threatened to throw Xanten immediately to the pavement. At last gaining the air, they flew up in a spiral, Castle Hagedorn became an intricate miniature far below...
Xanten indicated where he wished to alight; the Birds... set Xanten down so roughly that had he not been alert the shock would have pitched him head over heels.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/27/2020)
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I might also be thinking of K-9 from Doctor Who.
