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April 29, 2003
military swarm robots @06:43 PM
From New Scientist:
A battalion of 120 military robots is to be fitted with swarm intelligence software to enable them to mimic the organised behaviour of insects. The project, which received funding this week from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing ways to perform missions such as minesweeping and search and rescue with minimum intervention from human operators...
The question is how these swarming robots would be used in a military situation; or much more interesting, how swarming robots could be useful in a more social or cultural capacity.
posted by will | comments (1) | 
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The "swarm" seems to be a logical extension of paralell and networked computing. The idea of having a simple, expandable element that cooperates with a larger whole has many possibilities. The space program, for instance, is interested in probes like this (drop, say, a few thousand on Mars. If half of them fail, no biggie!). Most nanotechnology theories seem to depend on this structure as well, depending on ease of construction and more complex behavior over several simple (and in this case tiny) machines.
Another fascinating part is that this seems to be closer to how an actual human brain works. Perhaps this could be used as a means to generate a sort of intelligence. "Artificial life" being the buzzword here, but hoopla aside, this remains a fascinating aspect of computer science and robotics.
Posted by: todd at April 30, 2003 01:06 PM