Artificial intelligence: Riders on a swarm | The Economist

Artificial intelligence: Riders on a swarm | The Economist: "Digital ants and birds, then, are good at thinking up solutions to problems, but Dr Dorigo is now working on something that can act as well as think: robots. A swarm of small, cheap robots can achieve through co-operation the same results as individual big, expensive robots—and with more flexibility and robustness; if one robot goes down, the swarm keeps going. Later this summer, he will be ready to demonstrate his “Swarmanoid” project. This is based on three sorts of small, simple robot, each with a different function, that co-operate in exploring an environment. Eye-bots take a look around and locate interesting objects. Foot-bots then give hand-bots a ride to places identified by the eye-bots. The hand-bots pick up the objects of interest. And they all run home.

All this is done without any pre-existing plan or central co-ordination. It relies on interactions between individual robots. "