I don't know what it is that Swarmanoid actually does with the books that it steals, but the robot (or, a piece of the robot) has been pilfering them since back in 2009. At least stealing books is better than stealing kids, which is what Swarmanoid's predecessor did to keep itself busy. It's tough to call Swarmanoid a robot (singular), since it's made up of a swarm of dozens of separate robots, but it's equally tough to think of it as separate robots, since the individual members of the swarm depend on each other so heavily.
Putting grammar aside, the Swarmanoid swarm consists of three discrete types of robots, all of which we've been introduced to before: Foot-Bots can grab onto other robots and move horizontally. Hand-Bots have manipulators and a freakin' sweet magnetic grappling hook that lets them move vertically. And Eye-Bots can fly, perch on ceilings, and direct the movements of the Hand-Bots and Foot-Bots with their cameras.
We've been watching these swarm-bot modules evolve since 2007, and the following video (which won an award for best video at the 2011 Artificial Intelligence Conference last week) is the first that we've seen showing all of the bots seamlessly and autonomously cooperating to execute a task:
While trying to manage so many robots all at once may seem needlessly complicated, a swarm of robots has all kinds of advantages: swarms are adaptable, scalable, resilient, cost effective, and very efficient at any task that involves being in more than one place at once, like search and rescue (or search and steal). There are downsides, too, like having to recharge each and every one of these little guys, but with some epic amounts of cleverness by robotics researchers, robot swarms are getting to the point where they're able to pretty much take care of themselves, and after that, the sky's the limit.
Unless you have an Eye-bot, in which case it isn't.
[ Swarmanoid Project ] and [ AAAI Video Competition ] via [ Hizook ]
