Swarmanoid Is Handbots, Eyebots, And Footbots
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 7 of September , 2009 at 2:16 am
You’ve seen Eyebot. You’ve seen Handbot. The third and final piece of EPFL’s Swarmanoid project is, you guessed it, Footbot. Footbot looks to be a similar type of robot to another EPFL swarm project, employing the same mobility and docking technology. The idea behind Swarmanoid as a whole is that instead of having one robot with hands, eyes, and feet doing all those things you’d expect a humanoid robot to do, instead you’d just have whatever piece of a humanoid you happened to need for a particular task.
Most of the time, we humanoids (and humanoid robots) aren’t actively using all of our functional modules. Like, we’re either going somewhere, or looking for something, or performing some task with our hands. So really, there’s no need to have a complicated and expensive robot with integrated technologies that enable it to do all of these things at once. If you split all of these things into separate robots, as Swarmanoid does, you (hypothetically) retain all of the capability while expanding the versatility. Need a hands? A Footbot will bring you a Handbot or two, and there you go. And when you have the hands you need, the Footbot can go off and help someone else.
The biggest advantage, I think, of system like this is that you can easily (and, let’s hope, cheaply) replace or upgrade any component (read: robot) in the swarm. And by the same token, if any component fails, the swarm overall is largely unaffected. Compare this to a traditional humanoid: if one component fails, the entire robot is often rendered useless. There are also disadvantages, of course… It doesn’t seem likely that Swarmanoid will ever really manage to be nearly as creepy as androids can.
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Category: Research
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