Problem-Solving Robot Swarm Goes After Our Books

Teamwork in humans is inspiring. Teamwork in highly-coordinated robots is a bit eerie. Created by artificial intelligence researcher Marco Dorigo of Belgium's Università Libre de Bruxelles, the "Swarmanoid" is a team of specialized robots designed to work together to solve environmental problems. The team is made up of three separate types of'bots: hand-bots, eye-bots and foot-bots, each of which serves a specific function. As you likely already guessed, the hand-bot is designed to grasp things and manipulate them, the eye-bot to see things and map out obstacles and the foot-bot provides locomotion.