Comments on: Swarming robot ants

By: kyle007

kyle007 — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:00:06 +0000

This is kinda out of a science fiction novel why don’t we just put more rovers on mars. I don’t understand why we have to explore robotic swarms and tiny “robots” as well. You can see in the article there is a type of paper clip and these little robots. Why not empower university students with robotics contests in conjunction with nasa instead of mass producing tiny robots to act like ants, termites etc. I think you would have a greater effect on putting robots on mars that could multi task instead of relying on a “swarm” to accomplish a task… you can find videos on robot swarms on you tube. The concept is fairly new when we think of the robotic area as a whole people have been building robots for over 40 years the swarm technology is newer and not yet reliable.. watch the videos and read up on this you will see sometimes a robot in a swarm gets confused and just sits there forever,,,, er space junk!

@omega it does look like a table with an ant farm lol

By: omega

omega — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:55:09 +0000

Did anyone else think the picture with the article above was a table, and inside it, all those little brown spots, were the bots?

No? Uh, me neither.

By: PKM

PKM — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 11:33:31 +0000

I just finished re-reading the hob arc of dresden codak… now I’m thinking “grey goo mk. 1″

i, for one, welcome our new microscopic robot overlords

By: PUNiSH3R

PUNiSH3R — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:59:29 +0000

Well now, those certainly make McLurkin’s swarm robots look absolutely gargantuan…

By: fatali

fatali — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:46:20 +0000

and so is how the predecessors of the replicators began…. ;)