Military robots to get swarm intelligence

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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