Up until now, the divide-and-conquer technique was mankind’s best approach to quelling any robot uprisings. But now that self-assembling swarm bots — scary in their own right — are teaming up with eye-in-the-sky drones to tackle tricky obstacles, we’re pretty much screwed.
Demonstrated by a team of researchers at the 2012 Intelligent Robots and Systems conference, this little army of swarm bots is able to communicate with an overhead drone by simply using a series of flashing, coloured LED lights. This system not only lets the drone communicate with a specific robot, but also pass along instructions. All without the need for a wireless signal that could be easily jammed. Here, the technology is used to push a jug into the corner of a room, but how long before it’s used to push a jug onto someone’s head? [Automaton]