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SwarmOS Demonstrated at Idea Festival

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the welcoming-various-overlords dept.

PacoCheezdom writes "Intelligent Life has short summary of a demonstration by MIT professor James McLurkin of his new group-minded robots, which run an operating system called 'Swarm OS'. The robots are able to work together as a group not by communicating with all members of the group at once, but by talking only to their neighbors, and model other similar behaviors performed by bees and ants. "

1 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. James McLurkin by Digital_Quartz · · Score: 5, Informative

    I saw Mr. McLurkin give his presentation here in Ottawa. Fascinating stuff. Each component of the swarm is very dumb, with very little storage. If you want to store a location for future reference, it's very easy; park a robot there.

    All the robots have a sound system, though; the first thing Mr. McLurkin did during his presentation was to have a single robot request that 6 other robots follow it, and the swarm picked and allocated 6 robots, and they all went off in a chain, singing "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go".

    Check out James McLurkin's website for some presentations and videos:

    http://people.csail.mit.edu/jamesm/