Swarm robots invade UK conference, lets hope they’re all accounted for

August 8th, 2008 by

Filed under: Robots

It looks like the Artificial Life XI conference hosted by the University of Southampton was home to a unsettling number of swarm robots this week, including some we’ve seen and some we haven’t. Among the more interesting of the lot are the matchbox-size bots (pictured above) developed by a group of researchers from the host university, which apparently cost just £24 (or $46) each to produce and are able to independently divide up tasks with no central program controlling them. They’re even able to redistribute tasks if some of the robots fail or are removed from the area, which the researchers say makes them ideal for use in far-flung locations and, as the BBC’s video available at the link below shows, they’re also adorable when set to music.

[Thanks, David]

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Sugar cube-sized swarm bots could build Transformers, bring destruction upon us all

March 14th, 2008 by

Filed under: Robots

British scientists have started an EU-funded project named “Symbrion” to build swarm bots the size of a sugar cube, which could self-assemble with each other and form larger, more useful, and more box office-potent robots. Each bot will have wheels or tentacles to allow it to move around independently, along with its own brain to help it hunt down the other bots via infrared. Once assembled the bots should be able to take on the shape of a robo-snake, robo-spider, robo-arm or whatever else is required of them, and will pool their computing power — with hopefully enough juice between them to rattle off trite phrases and bad puns. This is certainly not a new concept, but the Symbrion project has a good £4.6 million of funding to get started — which we hear is worth roughly a million billion dollars in the US.

[Via Digg]

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