Robots are going to have to work together if they want to destroy us, their soft, fallible masters. But the current paradigm of having a Skynet-like (or rather, Zerglike) overmind control a set of semi-autonomous drones is too easy to beat — take out the brain and the rest fail, right? Not if they’re all the brain, which is the idea demonstrated in a wonderful new paper, “Mergeable nervous systems for robots.”
The admiration of the authors for our shining, pitiless destroyers is evident from the get-go. The very first sentence of their paper, published today in Nature Communications[1], reads:
Robots have the potential to display a higher degree of lifetime morphological adaptation than natural organisms.
Not if we don’t let them! But I digress. The researchers, a multinational team from Lausanne, Lisbon and Brussels (led by Marco Dorigo of the latter), point out that this amazing potential is, at present, unattained. Why? Because the swarmbots we’ve seen tend to outsource their intelligence[2] to a higher power like a computer watching them from above. They’re more like remote limbs than independent bots.
To fix that, to me reassuring, weakness, the team decided to imbue each robot with the ability to control both itself and its brethren. These MNS robots all have their own CPUs, sensors, wheels and so on, and can operate independently. But when one connects to another, it subjects its will to the “brain” robot and becomes as a mere appendage to it.
Bots operating independently avoid a green stimulus, then operate as single units once connected to do the same thing. Instructions always originate in the red-lit “brain” modules.
This has lots of...