Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Cool Science: Kilobot collective behaivor

So, you still don't believe that robots are going to take over the world one day, huh? Well, this little video clip from researchers at Harvard University, demonstrating cool "self-organizing" collective behavior from tiny robots, might convince you otherwise.




Okay, admittedly, it doesn't look to me like the robots are smart enough to pick up and take away a car or something like an ant colony would do - yet. However, even from the humble beginnings on this video, I can see how advanced these robots are becoming.

For example, the algorithms that they employ for gathering food are seemingly still quite rudimentary but functional. However, the thing to remember there is that nature has had millions of years to perfect these types of behaviors in ant colonies. For robots and researchers to have a functional algorithm to do the same thing after a few decades is cool.
 Toysmith 4M Tin Can Robot
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