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Swarm robots attack your bookshelf, win AAAI Oscar
What's more frightening than a swarm of robots? An award-winning swarm of robots trained to raid your library -- that's what. This SciFi-worthy outfit of mechanized literature swindlers, known as the "Swarmanoid," landed themselves the Best Video Award at this week's AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) conference in San Francisco. The video in question features the mixed bag of eye-bots, hand-bots and foot-bots in an Oceans 11-style bookcase heist. Of course, there are probably easier ways to reach the top shelf (e.g. a ladder), but none that get us thinking about the end times quite like this. The full video awaits you after the break.
Swarmanoid robot project foreshadows certain robotic takeover
So we had a glimpse of what thousands of robotic creatures linked together in harmonic teamwork looked like last year, but certainly didn't expect the European Union to go and drop £1,850,000 ($3,482,810) to make this kind of thing a serious endeavor. Nonetheless, an EU-sponsored 42-month research program into so-called swarm bots is set to commence next month, and will be led by Dr. Marco Dorigo of the University Libre de Bruxelles. The primary focus (aside from instilling an imminent fear of global robotic dominance) is to create a small army of specialized robots that can successfully "adapt to live in buildings," and help us common folk out while they're at it. The project will focus on 60 "dynamically connected autonomous 'bots," known collectively as a Swarmanoid, that consists of eye-bots, hand-bots, and foot-bots. While the names are fairly self-explanatory, eye-bots will handle the vision aspect while grappled onto ceilings, conveying the info to hand-bots (wall climbers and grabbers) and foot-bots (ground terrain specialists). Ultimately, the research team would like to see the bots solve certain "problems" by relying solely on one another's skill sets, and while we are admittedly frightened at what that really means, we'll just cross our fingers that the humans will still be the ones in control 3.5 years from now.[Via Robot Gossip]
