And in so doing, I could produce a model that would fly, stay in the air.

This is a project called Flight Patterns.

And a guy named Stan Reznikov did this as a pilot.

And these guys orbited a 30 or no, about a 22 mile long asteroid called Eros.

to receive a prize from the university, and three days later, a pilot was flying over the landscape and found this thing.

So the robot is obviously capable of executing any curve trajectory.

I'm a cousin and a pilot, so be it. By no means, I'll be an upholsterer.

A flight simulator

It was taken by this thing, which is called the Voyager spacecraft.

So one difficulty is how do you coordinate lots of these robots?

Now, I don't propose to sit on a flagpole or swallow goldfish. I'm not a stunt man. I'm a flyer.

I want to be a pilot in the future.

It's built to fly nonstop a long ways.

Mike has been making a model plane since breakfast.

And in the first video, you'll see the robot going from point A to point B through an intermediate point.

We have to fly at a special incline in order to make the measurements.

Text Jetman Yves Rossy Grand Canyon Narrator Many of the tests are conducted while Yves is strapped onto the wing, because Yves' body is an integral part of the aircraft.

(b) It will be an unmanned vehicle

So when we have a robot which is surrounded by neighbors and let's look at robot I and robot J what we want the robots to do is to monitor the separation between them as they fly in formation.

The FAA, the controlling body above all, calls it a powered lift aircraft.

The robot I'm holding in my hand is this one, and it's been created by two students, Alex and Daniel.

At the bottom right you see a robot performing a 360 degree flip in less than half a second.

The airmen are making reconnaissance flights, and the sailors...

So what I want to show you next is a video of 20 of these little robots flying in formation.

So the question is, how can you carry a pilot around the world with an airplane that uses the same amount of energy as a big Christmas tree?

They travel at exactly the same time with the same winds to make the crossing. I know they travel at the same altitude.

I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight testing airplanes for the Air Force.

So one fundamental problem that the robots have to solve if they're to be autonomous is essentially figuring out how to get from point A to point B.

No, agile aerial robots like this one.

It started in 1908, when the Wright brothers flew in Paris, and everybody said, Ooh, hey, I can do that. There's only a few people that have flown in early 1908. In four years, 39 countries had hundreds of airplanes, thousand of pilots. Airplanes were invented by natural selection.

Found one of his dirigibles that had enough dimensions so I could actually use it as a scale that I would then juxtapose with some of the things in Rome.

In our country, we say cosmonaut.

When this plane lands, you take the next one out... Anywhere!

A flight demonstration test for the first Japanese robot arm of the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), known as the Manipulator Flight Demonstration (MFD), was conducted on Space Shuttle flight STS 85 in August 1997.

You're going to make every mission.

I am known best for human powered flight, but that was just one thing that got me going in the sort of things that I'm working in now.

You have to identify that this is a before takeoff checklist.

We had a press conference, we announced our intent to do one zero g parabola, give him 25 seconds of zero g.

So just like a diver stands on a springboard and then jumps off it to gain momentum, and then does this pirouette, this two and a half somersault through and then gracefully recovers, this robot is basically doing that.

The co pilot was a lady called Monica.

Question one so does that actually feel the way the flying dream does?

So we did a second parabola.

Over the Atlantic on a plane ?

I flew off to a place that's been shrouded in mystery for centuries, a place some folks call Shangri La.

(a) The four F 4 Turkish military aircraft coming in one formation entered the FIR of Nicosia, violating international air traffic regulations before exiting towards the FIR of Ankara