Swarmanoid

About a week back I posted on FB a short video on a new kind of robotic feedback system. It's pretty cool. Actually, it's way more than cool. It's scary, yet exciting.  Here's part of the transcript describing it:

Swarmanoid is a parallel distributed system. Parallel activity and redundancy increase its robustness and flexibility."

"The true value of the Swarmanoid concept would manifest itself in parallel task execution scenarios, and in unstructured environments.

I can't even begin to fathom what potential applications this would have, on an individual level, and a societal one. Think of the possibilities: robots that collectively work together autonomously and intelligently think, systematically plan, assess, calculate the best set of tactical maneuvers to solve a set physical goal, workout to adapt around fluctuating/constantly changing environments and overcome obstacles. Okay, those were pretty vague examples.

In the video, their objective was to search and get a book, then take it back to a pre-designated area. For specific real life applications, I would be thinking this: search and collect a missing item to bring back to its owner, use in libraries to automate book organization, automation of organizing supermarket inventory, automation of harvesting a variety of produce in food production, assistance in civil construction, manufacturing, and perhaps many other things.

Of course, the bots in that video seem slow, and only operates on a small scale. But that shouldn't be too much of an issue, as future designs and demonstrations of modified versions will surely address.