Watch out Seal Team Six, there’s a new group of special forces entering the mix – and they’re out for your literature.
Evan Ackerman over at IEEE has written an interesting blog post about the Swarmanoid project.
The swarmanoid robots consist of three types, each specializing in specific tasks: hands, feet, and eyes. When their powers combine they turn into an unstoppable machine on a mission to steal your valuables.
You could call it Mission Impossible: Robot Library Heist. An army of flying, rolling, and climbing robots have been taught to work together to find and snatch a book from a high shelf.Read the full post >>
In a striking display of military-like precision, the robotic team, dubbed the 'Swarmanoid', attacks the problem with flying 'eye-bots' and rolling 'foot-bots'. A 'hand-bot' then fires a grappling hook-like device up to the ceiling and scales the bookshelf. Footage of the experiment, conducted by Marco Dorigo at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, and colleagues, won the video competition at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco earlier this week.
It's a simple demonstration, but in the future Dorigo says the robots could be tasked with more difficult and important tasks. For instance, a bot team equipped like firefighters could wait in a building and spring to action when disaster strikes.
Swarm robotics is really starting to produce some interesting results. This image is from the video embedded after the break that show a group of five robots creating a landing platform for a quadrotor helicopter. The four that actually make up the platform are not in contact with each other, but instead following commands from the leader. We’re impressed by the helicopter’s ability to target and land on the moving platform. Takeoff appears to be another issue, as the platform bots stop moving until the quadcopter is airborne again.
These robots are part of a Graduate project at Georgia Tech. [Ted Macdonald] has been working along with others to implement an organizational algorithm that guides the swarm. The method requires that the robots have an overview of the location of all others in the swarm. This is done with high-speed cameras like we’ve seen in other robotic control projects. But that doesn’t discourage us. If you already have a flying robot as part of the swarm, you might as well add a few more to serve as the eyes in the sky.
[Thanks Supertroopa via Engadget]
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