I-SWARM Micro Robots | BotJunkie

Description

While most robot designers shoot for more capable and more complicated robots, the philosophy behind swarm robotics is totally different: make the robots as simple as possible, and let complex capabilities emerge from the cooperative powers of a whole bunch of them. We’re already familiar with macro-scale swarm robots, but researchers in Europe are trying to shrink things down to insect scale.

These tiny (4 millimeters on a side) robots are members of the I-SWARM project, which stands for Intelligent Small-World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation. Each robot is simple, with three legs and a little poker to manipulate stuff with. They’re designed to work in large, cheap, mass producible, replaceable groups doing things that insects would be good at… Surveillance, obviously, but they could also do things like clean your house by taking care of one bit of dust each.

Original URL

http://www.botjunkie.com/2009/08/31/i-swarm-micro-robots/

http://www.botjunkie.com/2009/08/31/i-swarm-micro-robots/