Fred On Something'sComments

‘James McLurkin has a novel party trick - he coaxes 20 small, autonomous wheeled robots to form herds, disperse, wheel in neat circles, sing a harmonic rendition of the Star Wars theme, and automatically recharge from a power station.

Mr McLurkin, a postgraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is designing robots to work together to make collective decisions. If he succeeds, swarms of robots could be put to work in business, in the home, and by the military, perhaps in space.

“A swarm or a team can collaborate to overcome what a single robot might not be able to do,” explains Paolo Gaudiano, who works on swarms at Icosystem in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Soon, teams of 40 robots could be employed as border security guards and outside airports. Frontline Robotics in Ottawa, Canada, installed collaborative software on its vacuum cleaner-sized PC-bots and its much larger vehicle-sized “Grunts”, which it plans to put to work patrolling a runway at Ottawa airport. The firm has also sold Grunts to a South Korean company called DoDaam Systems, which is hoping to win a contract from the South Korean Government to patrol its border with North Korea.

The patrolling robots will use wi-Ff to share what they see, sniff and hear. They may even be able to triangulate the exact position of an intruder, or the source of a plume of smoke from an explosion, something no single robot could do.’

“Swarm” is a new Artificial Intelligence domain that scientists explore since some decades. I think that the most promising avenues of the technologies are in military or for the space exploration. I know that the NASA works on such robot teams to eventually send them to explore a new planet or to build a pre-base for humans.

Read more at Robot swarms must learn to bee hive