Harvard TERMES: Structure building swarm robots -- inspired by termites

[mhectorgato]

Learning from nature:

the TERMES robots are very simple, but are capable of working together to build relatively complex structures over time, using a simple set of rules that don’t require any centralized common control.

TERMES

article with above video: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/termes-project-concludes-insect-robots-declare-victory

To recap, these robots are a swarm in the sense that there’s a bunch of them all working on the same project, but on the other hand each acts independently, coordinating their work through their shared environment. So they’re not like a colony where a robot queen (or other overseeing entity) directs them to do what they do; rather, each robot has an idea in its little head of what structure it’s trying to build, and will drop its building block wherever it finds a space in need of one. It’ll avoid other robots while doing this, but otherwise ignore them