iRobot's Robots Clear Land Mines And Clean Your House
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Most fascinating is a product called Swarm. In a room, 16 small, square robots on wheels are scattered on the floor. Each one has three lights on top resembling a traffic light--red, yellow and green. The point of the Swarm project is to be able to program lots of robots to communicate with each other using proprietary Behavior Language software. And we're not talking about 10 or even 100 bots, but 10,000 or more. The name 'Swarm' comes from the robots' ability to work like insects.
'We especially looked at the behavior of ants and bees for this,' says James McLurkin, Swarm Project Manager. 'We don't want to copy their behavior, but want to look at a working system that basically recruits workers to different sites.'
The robots communicate using an infrared light signal that begins with a chosen leader (which has an antenna on its head) and then spreads to the rest. So essentially, they 'talk' to each other. When this happens, the lights begin flashing. Each light has an accompanying sound. The sounds tell the robots how far away they are from each other.
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