Robots may be the wave of the future, but it will be a pretty chaotic future if they don't learn to work together. This cooperative approach is known as swarm roboticsand in a first in the field, a team of engineers has demonstrated a swarm of intelligent aquatic surface robots that can operate together in a real-world environment. Using "Darwinian" learning, the robots are designed to teach themselves how to cooperate in carrying out a task.
According to the team, the clever bit about the swarm is that, like schools of fish or flocks of birds, none of the robots know of or "care" about the other robots beyond their immediate neighbors. Instead, they react to what their immediate neighbors do as they determine the best way to fulfill their mission objectives such as area monitoring, navigation to waypoint, aggregation, and dispersion. In a sense, they learn to cooperate with one another.
The team is currently working on the next generation of aquatic robots with more advanced sensors and the ability to handle longer missions. Eventually, they could be used in swarms numbering hundreds or thousands of robots for environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and maritime surveillance.
https://youtu.be/JBrkszUnms8
http://www.gizmag.com/swarm-nautical-robots/41607/
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