I want. Please send me a set, lol.
The main focus of this project is to investigate and develop novel principles of adaptation and evolution for symbiotic multi-robot organisms based on bio-inspired approaches and modern computing paradigms. Such robot organisms consist of super-large-scale swarms of robots, which can dock with each other and symbiotically share energy and computational resources within a single artificial-life-form.
—SYMBRION: Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms
This site is devoted to development of the open-source hardware and software micro-robotic platform in the size of less-then-3cm-cube. The main goal of this project is to develop a cheap, reliable and swarm-capable micro-robot, that can be easily reproduced even at home. This robot allows building a large-scale swarm system (100 and more robots) to investigate artificial self-organization, emergent phenomena, control in large robotic groups and so on.
Update: 2008-06-09:
I’d forgotten about Boids, which I’d discovered a long time ago…
Boids (Wikipedia), developed by Craig Reynolds, is an artificial life program, simulating the flocking behaviour of birds. There are numerous articles and implementations on the Internet.
Swarm intelligence (Wikipedia) is artificial intelligence based on the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.
