iRobot, the company behind the Roomba, doesn’t just make robotic vacuum cleaners. They’re also building robots that could group together in swarms and be used to clear landmines or rescue earthquake victims:
The point of the Swarm project is to be able to program lots of robots to communicate with each other using proprietary Behavior Language software. And we’re not talking about 10 or even 100 bots, but 10,000 or more. The name “Swarm” comes from the robots’ ability to work like insects… The robots communicate using an infrared light signal that begins with a chosen leader (which has an antenna on its head) and then spreads to the rest. So essentially, they “talk” to each other. When this happens, the lights begin flashing. Each light has an accompanying sound. The sounds tell the robots how far away they are from each other.
