This video shows swarm bots attacking pulling a child across the floor. The look on the kids face at 2:37 is classic. All joking aside, this is an amazing demonstration of the advantages of many small robots working together to accomplish a task.
The goal of this project is the study of a novel design approach to hardware implementation for testing and using the capability of self-assembling, self-organising, and metamorphosis of robotic systems. Such an approach finds its theoretical roots on recent studies in swarm intelligence, i.e., in studies of self-organising and self-assembling capabilities shown by social animals.
More information about the Swarm-bots
12 thoughts on “Swarm-bots attack”
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someone needs to watch sci-fi a little more. i get eery replicator-terminator-matrix-esque feelings when I think of masses of robots that are working together and being built so they can build themselves.
the apocalypse is coming!
Note the reassuring hand on the child’s in the early stages of the video. You can just imagine: “Ok Susie, now you just lie here and the robots will come over and grab you in a big swarm and pull you over to the other side” and the kid is thinking “Mechanical bees are coming to drag me away!”
From a technical standpoint though, very cool, the design with the robot signaling via lighting that its joined a given group and is ready to pull is a nice touch too.
Why do the robots move so slowly? Is it a limitation of the calculating speed of their tiny embedded processors, or because their mechanical parts can’t cope with the increased momentum higher speed would bring?
@justDIY
Most likely because if they went any faster the kid would have freaked out! ;)
Surely there’s a less traumatising way to demonstrate this functionality ?
Full of ossum-ness