Swarmaniod - The Movie

At a San Francisco conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) this week, researchers from the Free University in Belgium won the best video award. The video is of their robot swarm called Swarmanoid. The task was for a swarm of three different robots to find and retrieve a book from a shelf. The robot swarm consists of a hand bot that can grab and climb, an eye bot that flies and can view the surroundings, and a foot bot that can rove and pick up the hand bot. The very colorful robots work together to accomplish the task and bring the book back to the starting point. The video is a wonderful visual display of robot swarm grace and beauty and you can easily appreciate why the video won.