@gizmag @MIT Beerbots demonstrate robotic collaboration
I’ve always found the concept of a “swarm” of robots to be more fun to watch rather than being an approach capable of providing useful work. It seems like the effort in polling all the robots around the current one and determining the next action to be wasteful in terms of computing power (as well as robot design and software development) - it also doesn’t account for situations where more than one task is to be carried out. I always felt that a minimal number of robots working collaboratively would be a much more effect way of completing a singular or multiple tasks.
MIT (mit.edu) is working on the problem of having robots collaborate on an unexpected task - bar tending and refreshment delivery with their beerbots. Rather than being something that is just a cute way to gain headlines for the robotics lab, the work being done here is very sophisticated and quite impressive. You can read more about it here (gizmag.com), read the paper that was generated from it (roboticsproceedings.org) and see the movie:
The robots are designed to work in a world of uncertainty, much like human bar tenders and servers need to.
In the Futurama universe, these problems have all been solved.