Waterborne Robots Display Emergent Behavior
Vessels is a robotic art installation consisting of fifty autonomous robots floating around in a pool and interacting with their fellows using a variety of sensors.
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swarmbots
XinCheJian’s $10 Swarm Robots
Shanghai hackerspace XinCheJian won 2nd place in a competition to build $10 robots.
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Synchronized Nano-Quadrotor Swarm
It used to be that having your own quadrotor drone was cutting edge. Now that the average joe can pick one up at their local mall for a couple hundred bucks means that you’ve got to step your game up if you don’t want to be seen as pedestrian. That’s why today’s aspiring UAV enthusiasts are working with swarms. Not just any swarms either, but swarms of nano-quadrotors. These days, budget conscious drone makers are going small to cut costs and shed ounces.
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Alt.CES: Swarming Micro Air Vehicles
These flying swarmbots would fall under the category of things that aren’t at CES but we wish were. Maybe next year? They are part of a project at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland to explore large aerial robot swarms.
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Top 10: Swarmbots!
I first wanted to call this post “When ‘Bots Attack” or something similarly FOX-esque, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. There’s been plenty of alarmism about robots recently, and swarming robots are particularly juicy targets for people looking to stir up controversy since there seems to be something particularly loathsome and/or frightening to us about swarming creatures in general.
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MIT hushing up swarmbot display tech?
On Wednesday morning, Evan Ackerman over at BotJunkie posted about MIT’s Flyfire system. The idea behind the system is simple and very exciting: Swarms of tiny LED-carrying robot helicopters arrange themselves in the air to make 2D or 3D displays in which each bot serves as a single pixel. Evan linked to the project’s homepage on MIT’s SENSEable City Lab server and embedded a video posted by the group to YouTube showing the individual prototype swarmbots, which already exist, and some computer renderings of what the working displays would look like. Exciting, eh?
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Open source swarmbots
One of my fave websites at the moment is Hizook, Travis Deyle’s robot news portal. Here’s a snippet from a piece he posted about the University of Stuttgart and University of Karlsruhe’s open source swarm robot project: I’m a huge fan of so-called micro robots — those with cm length scales, thus μ m3. I’ve […]
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