Robot swarm forages for food

If robots can learn to cooperate, teams of automatons could patrol borders or help out in the home. So far, it's been hard to test software that coordinates robot swarms because of the cost and difficulty of maintaining several robots. But now an army of low-cost, social robots, designed by Mike Rubenstein and his team at the WYSS Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is proving to be a feasible way to test these systems.

In this video, you can see some of the complex behaviour they are capable of.