SwarmBot: Self-Assembling Robots for Planetary Precolonization

Earlier today, we chanced on an updated cache of videos featuring the cute, cubic SuperBot. SwarmBot is its more sinister and ambitious European counterpart, touted as a way to precolonize planets in advance of human settlers.

Though the actual robotics are not so sleek, lacking the SuperBot's propensity to peer about, form rolling circles, or wriggle along with caterpillar-like undulations, the Swarm's spontanous formation of map-like cellular networks has its own charm.

"A project coordinated by Professor Marco Dorigo, which was sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Community, provided the impetus behind the swarm-bots. The researchers built small identical robots that can sense and latch onto each other to self-configure a giant specimen with no center of command. Looking sort of like a train or a swarm of bees, swarm-bots can assemble themselves up to any finite size, the scientists predict."

Each S-Bot, as they are named, makes connections with its neighbors and, through them, connections with faraway nodes. They "did not design the swarm-bot for any particular application at this stage," but have seriously hardcore ambitions, including planetary "precolonization," deep sea exploration and search and rescue missions. Make these fellas Von Neumann probes, and I'm there.

Each also looks like a little descendant of the robot from the original TV series "Lost in Space," which, if nothing else, deserves some kind of retro-futurism award.

Robot builds itself for special tasks [Physorg]