Tuesday, September 28, 2010

A flock of robots


The images we have in our heads of robots being present everywhere around us still mostly associate to those generated by the media. Let's replace them quickly with images of 'reality' so we're preparing ourselves for such a future. For example, watch the movie below, which shows an experiment in the "fully autonomous deployment of large aerial swarms."



The creators of these artificial birds imagine the robots to be useful especially for setting up communication networks in rescue areas. What's interesting from a technology point of view is that the robots were designed as efficient as possible through biology-inspired strategies. For example, the collective of aerial robots develops and maintains pathways for communication in a way that ants develop pheromone pathways to a food source.

See more on the official project page here:
http://lis.epfl.ch/?content=research/projects/SwarmingMAVs/

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