Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

Swarm stuff may seem like the newest bleeding edge in artificial intelligence, but long before the replicators appeared, Brooks and Flynn were already planning in 1989 to invade celestial bodies with swarms of bots.

Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive. The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails. The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components. Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheeled) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of mass produced simple autonomous robots that are small by today’s standards (1 to 2 Kg). We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that launch mass can be slashed, that totally autonomous robots can be more reliable than ground controlled robots, and that large numbers of robots can change the tradeoff between reliability of individual components and overall mission success. Lastly, we suggest that within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots. [ read more Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System ]

Papers:
Heterogeneous Multi Robot Cooperation ( pdf )
Today the earwig, tomorrow the man
Intelligence with out reason ( pdf )

More Information:
MIT AI Lab: Mobot Group
Kevin Kelly: Machines with Attitude
Retired Robots – Hannibal and Attila
Attila: A Six Legged Autonomous Walking Robot

See also:
Google will pay you 20 million to send your robot to the moon