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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
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!
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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.
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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?
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@justDIY
Most likely because if they went any faster the kid would have freaked out! ;)
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Surely there's a less traumatising way to demonstrate this functionality ?
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