Robotic Swarms

[Tuckerfan]

Pretty cool idea.

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have received a $5 million grant from the Department of Defense to develop large-scale “swarms” of robots that could work together to thoroughly search large areas from the ground and sky.

The Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors or the Swarms Project, as it is known, takes organizational cues from the natural world where tens or even hundreds of small, independent robots work together to accomplish specific tasks, such as finding a bomb in a crowded city.

Penn’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory will receive the five-year grant from the federal government under the Defense Department’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program. The Swarms project is based upon the success of the GRASP Lab’s smaller-scale Multiple Autonomous Robotics project, which managed the movement and behavior of about a dozen robots.

[Can_Handle_the_Truth]

This is the subject of michael crichton’s novel Prey. It deals with nano robots that can swarm together to form complex mechanisms like flying cameras. Eventually they begin to imitate people and try to take over the world.