Octopus Inspires AI Robots on a Mission

If you want an artificially intelligent system to reason like a person, model it after an octopus. Jim Crowder, chief engineer at Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services, and his colleague John Carbone are working toward robotic systems that possess distributed intelligence like that found in octopi. The robotic systems could be useful in managing dozens of autonomous vehicles or drones at once, such as a flock of unmanned aerial vehicles sent to scout a disaster zone for survivors. "Right now, it takes many people to run one UAV," Crowder told DNews. "You want to see one person running several UAVs."