Swarmanoid Robot Project

The Swarmanoid Project will be launched in October, led by Dr. Marco Dorigo of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and sponsored by the EU.

A Swarmanoid robot is a robot that is able to function in a human environment, like a humanoid robot, but it is made up of seperate units, each with their own funtion.

The Swarmanoid is expected to be made from eye-bots, hand-bots and foot-bots.

The eye-bots climb around up high, say along the ceiling, and watch what's going on. They act as the eyes for the hand-bots and foot-bots - just as our eyes in our head see for our hands and feet.

The hand-bots will be wall climbers with limbs. They will be able to move across vertical surfaces and pick things up.

The foot-bots will move across the floor to carry stuff. The foot-bots could even carry the hand-bots or eye-bots if they need to move across the room.

The tasks that are assigned to each member of the robot swarm will depend on their skills and on the need of the group. The Swarmanoid will act as a single body but will be distributed between each of the seperate members of the swarm.

The (US $2.5 million) project is planned to last 42 months. It is an extension of the Swarm-bots project which completed in 2005.

The foot-bots for the Swarmanoid will be just like the s-bots from the earlier swarm project. The s-bots worked together as a self-organizing team. They also could hook onto each other to act as a single entity when necessary.

The Engineer Online - What a lot of bots