In a striking display of military-like precision, the robotic team, dubbed the “Swarmanoid”, attacks the problem with flying “eye-bots” and rolling “foot-bots”. A “hand-bot” then fires a grappling hook-like device up to the ceiling and scales the bookshelf. Footage of the experiment, conducted by Marco Dorigo at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and colleagues. It’s a simple demonstration, but in the future Dorigo says the robots could be tasked with more difficult and important tasks. For instance, a bot team equipped like firefighters could wait in a building and spring to action when disaster strikes.
