in a lab at the university of pennsylvania, vijay kumar is funded in part by the military to create autonomous drones that don't need external links and, like us, can sense their environment. what you see on this robot are these two chips here which are essentially rate gyroscopes. these play the same role as the semicircular canals in the human body located near the ears, which essentially tell us orientation. so the rate gyroscopes that are on board can actually measure these angular velocities at thousands of times a second. this chip here is the accelerometer and this allows the robot to sense accelerations in the lateral direction so these are analogs to the otolith organs that measure acceleration in the human head. narrator: when a human pilot feels an unexpected change in acceleration, he knows to adjust the aircraft. kumar: the robots do exactly the same thing. narrator: the sensors adjust the craft by changing the relative velocities of the rotors and allow the drones to follow a leader with precision. kumar: a fundamental problem in coordinating multiple robots is the ability to mai