Robot swarms cloud danger

Engineers at the

have received a $5 million grant from the

to develop large-scale "swarms" of robots that could work together to thoroughly search large areas from the ground and sky.

The Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors or the Swarms Project, as it is known takes organisational cues from the natural world where tens or even hundreds of small, independent robots work together to accomplish specific tasks, such as finding a bomb in a crowded city.

Penn's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory will receive the five-year grant from the federal government under the Defense Department's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program. The Swarms project is based upon the success of the GRASP Lab's smaller-scale Multiple Autonomous Robotics (MARS) project, which managed the movement and behaviour of about a dozen robots.

"Our objective here is to develop the software framework and tools for a new generation of autonomous robots, ultimately to the point where an operator can supervise an immense swarm of small robots through unfamiliar terrain," said Vijay Kumar, director of the GRASP Lab at Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science and principal investigator of the Swarms Project. "There is an obvious military application, to be sure, but the same principles apply whether you are looking for a terrorist in an urban environment or localising the source of a chemical spill in a city."