Today's London Telegraph has a story on the new European Union funded open-source, open-hardware Symbrion project that aims to create, according to the website, "super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share energy and computational resources within a single artificial-life-form."
"When it is advantageous to do so, these swarm robots can dynamically aggregate into one or many symbiotic organisms and collectively interact with the physical world via a variety of sensors and actuators."
The project, which involves researchers from a "swarm" of ten universities, hopes to develop applications that support search and rescue missions, space exploration and medicine.
Prof. Alan Winfield from the University of the West of England, Bristol, is quoted in the Telegraph story as saying:
"A swarm could be released into a collapsed building following an earthquake. They could form themselves into teams searching for survivors or to lift rubble off stranded people. Some robots might form a chain allowing rescue workers to communicate with survivors while others assemble themselves into a ‘medicine bot' to give first aid. The robots have functionality on their own, but they can also combine together or adapt and change as the situation requires. The individual robots won't change physically, but they will adapt and evolve their functionally."
Shades of transformers!
The project is set to complete in 2013.
Speaking of transformers, check out this Toshiba-Softbank model 815T PB transformer cell phone.
Maybe the Symbrion folks and they can get together and create a cell phone swarm for who knows what - any suggestions out there?
