Last week there was the Thrilling Wonder Stories event at the Architectural Association – a mixture of cutting-edge game design, movie VFX, science fiction, DIY taxidermy, and a few sessions on robots.
One of the presenters was Dr Roderick Gross from the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield. They’ve been working on the swarmbots and swarmanoid EU research projects – you may have seen one of the swarmbot demos on YouTube – a slightly creepy video of robots pulling a small child.
They’re doing some really interesting work on swarms of robots with individual skills and powers. The latest video shows a slightly tortuous set of handbots, footbots and eyebots to retrieve a book from a bookshelf.
What’s amazing is that these are true robots – they are given a task but not told how to accomplish it and between them they work out how to solve the problem. Even better, they use flying robots to survey the environment and also to deploy a wireless network.
We’re starting to see some of the output of military R&D on robots: not only are these drones in use but they’re almost off-the-shelf components. Given the way military R&D trickles down into consumer electronics, I can see toys having this technology built in in 5-10 years time.
Drones are somewhere between radio controlled vehicles and robots that think for themselves. Whilst they have a remote pilot, they can be operating up to 4 planes at once, and the drones can do most of the mundane flying tasks without human intervention.
Some drones look like no previous aircraft – no need for crew means no windows, no flight deck and no need for a pressurised cabin. Others employ biomimicry – the idea that nature has evolved the best systems and forms for tasks such as flying. One drone downed in Pakistan had been modified to look more like a bird, and Festo are creating flying machines based on herring gulls.
Less natural looking are spherical robots. This large sphere can send back video and cope with many kinds of terrain.
Of course, there’s an iPhone version too – though why you would want a radio-controlled ball is a bit of a mystery to me.
And to bring it all together, a spherical flying robot drone from Japan’s Ministry of Defence.