SWARM has been showing up at a number of places. Until now, the mysterious spheres have been under human control. However, the SWARM has taken the first steps to autonomous control. The SWARM is a kinetic art project consisting of several large self-propelled metallic spheres that interact with each other and their environment. Each orb in the swarm is fitted out with a processor, GPS, accelerometers, and Zigbee wireless communications. The entire project is open source. Slated to appear at the 2008 Burning Man festival, the orbs will use their GPS to wander within a specified area, keeping themselves “in bounds”.
Here’s the plot of one orb exploring a soccer field. Burning Man attendees will most likely see the whole SWARM in full autonomous operation.
My toes!
They should let them loose in Boston, People will go insane.
Remember kids, this is the first step to SkyNet…
This touches on my idea of taking the brain out of a Roomba and putting it on a lawn mower…. I hate to mow.
Why does this remind me of the XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/413/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtDhIn3D_a0
“It has no collision detection. At Burning Man if a Hippy walks in front of it, it’s going to run over the Hippy.”
Also neat how it’s not Autonomous per-se, but it runs off of a ‘mothernode’ as in true swarm intelligence.
they should totally weaponize these things, speed em up a bit, build 100 or so of em, program and deploy them for crowd control. oh yeah.
If I see one I’ll pick it up, unplug power take home and have fun with parts. Just kidding. Very neat.
love it!
Just sharpen the parts of the frame and you’ve got a killbot :)