Swarming Spy Bots That Share Information Being Built for Military Computerworld

BAE Systems is creating microbots inspired by birds and insects for the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. The robots could eventually be used by soldiers to locate nearby enemies, determine their positions and weaponry, and listen in on their conversations. BAE's Aaron Penkacik says the robots will operate as a distributed system, or swarm, to gather information and send it back in a unified stream. For example, a swarm of robots the size of large insects could contain one robot that captures video, another that records sound, and another that detects chemical agents. The robots will share the information and send it back to a command center or soldier in a unified message. BAE scientists recently started designing the system, which is expected to be a five-year project, but Penkacik says soldiers may be able to use basic models of the spy robots earlier than that while engineers continue to refine the machines. Penkacik says the biggest challenge is to make the robots work collaboratively. "We need to work on collaborative behavior with multiple robots so they can do distributed data fusion in an ad hoc network that's moving in real time," he says. "All the information you get from these different sensors is what we're looking at to create knowledge that helps the war fighter stay alive."http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9084638