James McLurkin has a novel party trick – he can coax 20 small autonomous wheeled robots to form herds, disperse again, wheel in neat circles, sing a harmonic rendition of the theme from Star Wars, and automatically recharge from a power station.
McLurkin, a postgraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is trying to design robots that will work together and make collective decisions. If he succeeds, swarms of robots could one day be put to work in the home, in space and by the military. “A swarm or a team can collaborate to overcome what a single robot might…
