Military robots to get swarm intelligence

12:21 25 April 03
NewScientist.com news service

A battalion of 120 military robots is to be fitted with swarm intelligence software to enable them to mimic the organised behaviour of insects.
The project, which received funding this week from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing ways to perform missions such as minesweeping and search and rescue with minimum intervention from human operators.
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The 120 robots were built for the US military by I-Robot, a company co-founded by robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks.
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"Pathological configurations"
Swarm intelligence describes the way that complex behaviours can arise from large numbers of individual agents each following very simple rules. For example, ants use the approach to find the most efficient route to a food source.
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ABCNEWS.com : What Defines a Machine as a Robot? The Meaning of Robots

What Defines a Machine as a Robot?
By Lindsey Arent, Tech Live

April 23 — To you, that boxy thing in your kitchen that sprays soap and water on your dirty dishes and is decorated with plastic buttons may look like a regular old dishwasher. But some say that machine is really a robot.
A dictionary defines "robot" as a mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human, and is capable of performing a variety of often-complex human tasks on command, or by being programmed in advance.
But engineering professor and robotics expert Ken Goldberg of the University of California at Berkeley has a more exact definition.
"It responds to its environment and it can manipulate its environment. It can do things," he says, in reference to modern dishwashers that can sense how dirty the dishes are and change its own settings accordingly
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