Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
Mapping the treacherous terrain of one of the Alps' most deadly peaks just got a lot easier, with a fleet of eBee mini-drones providing a 300 million point 3D map in less than six hours of flight time. Inventors SenseFly launched the foldable backpack-mounted drones from the summit and midway down the mountain to knit together 2800 images into a crisp model, despite blustering winds and formidable climbing conditions.
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
100 swarm robots tackle the "piano mover's problem" under the guidance of Aaron Becker, an assistant professor at Rice University. The piano mover's problem, also known as "motion planning problem", looks at how robots can be programmed to move continuously within a space while avoiding obstacles and not falling down stairs.
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
Roboticists at UPenn are already saving soldiers' lives with their bridge-building swarms of aquatic robots. Well, almost. For now, the bots are only 1/12 scale models of shipping containers -- which swarm together to provide a water crossing for vehicles -- and the soldier is really just a wooden doll. But U.S. military research agency DARPA has taken a liking to the project, and it could soon be getting bigger.
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
Imagine building blocks which can effortlessly construct themselves into any shape. MIT student John Romanishin is making it happen with M-Blocks: self-assembling robot cubes capable of jumping, climbing, and rolling their way to form any variety of complex structures. Romanishin hopes that thousands of the cubes could construct ladders, furniture, or any other object, at a moment's notice.
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
KMel Robotics have already made a name for themselves, going viral by showing off their quadrotor swarm's ability to do everything from strumming out the James Bond themetune, to mastering synchronized flying displays. UPenn graduates Alex Kushleyev and Daniel Mellinger created the company in 2011 to develop quadrotor swarms to suit any purpose.
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
A swarm of killer robots raging war against wave after wave of deadly jellyfish -- this is happening in real life, folks. The battle is taking place today off the coast of Korea, where researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have deployed the Jellyfish Elimination Robotic Swarm (JEROS) to autonomously locate and and exterminate troublesome jellyfish blooms with an internal blender (link warning: gruesome jellyfish death).
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
It sounds like the plot of children's cartoon: create a miniature model of anything your heart desires, drop it in a miraculous bag of sand, and a full sized version will appear. But researcher's at MIT's Distributed Robotics Lab are on their way to making it a reality with Smart Sand. Right now, they're a little bigger than the researchers would like -- "pebble-sized" rather than sand -- and, okay, the results aren't particularly awe-inspiring. But watch this space.
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
The University of Sheffield's "nanobots" are designed to be as basic as possible. Yet they have already mastered simple fetching and carrying tasks, such as grouping these objects together, without central control. The Natural Robotics Lab's Dr Roderich Gross sees them as the servants of the future, taking care of search and rescue missions in areas where it is too dangerous for humans to go.
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
Proving that robot swarms can go anywhere, researchers from Scotland's Heriot-Watt University have created Nessie: an autonomous underwater vehicle capable of diving into deep water to help save the country's endangered coral reefs. A swarm 'team' will replace human divers who currently reassemble damaged coral with the hope that it will regrow. Researchers take inspiration from the behavior of natural swarms of insects -- such as bees -- to collectively maintain complex structures.
Your friendly neighborhood robot swarm —
Keen to capitalize on the development of swarm technology, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a $2million prize for reserachers able to develop autonomous robots. Intended for disaster response, the threat of killer robot swarms is not here... yet.
