Does it get more cool than this (robotically speaking)? A formation of quadricoptors playing the James Bond theme. Congratulations to the folks at the University of Pennsylvania who came up with this.

I spent 4 days in San Diego a week ago at another FIRST Robotics Competition. This event was smaller than the previous one I attended in Cleveland and I was even less busy with official Luminary Micro support work so I had a lot more time to watch the matches.

During this time, I played with my Powershot G9. I had found out the previous week that it was capable of shooting time lapse video (yes, I had read the manual but I guess I forgot this since I reckoned it was another totally useless feature) so I shot some of the matches and the crowd reaction in 24x and cut it together into a little video on Vimeo. I also uploaded this to Flickr as an experiment now that they support video in addition to stills.

I really think this makes a rather effective intro to the competition and gives some impression of the excitement of the event. If you want a less frenetic version, I’ve created a set of my favourite FRC images on Flickr too.