It's interesting (to me at least) that some of the most advanced robots being developed today are based on animals and not humans. Michigan State researchers have already developed a robot fish - and now they're working on robot schools of fish that will work together.

And if you haven't seen the SpotMini robot "dogs" developed by Boston Dynamics (who get a lot of funding from DARPA - an agency of the defense department) watch this video of two robots working together (and totally on their own) to figure out how to open a door:

 

Concerned? Don't be. According to Yahoo.com, Brown University assistant professor of computer science George Konidaris, says a robot’s “low-level interface with the world makes it really hard to decide what to do. Imagine how hard it would be,” he says, “to plan something as simple as a trip to the grocery store if you had to think about each and every muscle you’d flex to get there, and imagine in advance and in detail the terabytes of visual data that would pass through your retinas along the way.”

David Held, an expert in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University says, "robots are basically programmed to perform precise motion that they repeat over and over. But if you want to have robot caretakers for the elderly or robots that help in disaster zones, things like that — there’s so many different types of variations that the robot will have to be able to handle. And that’s a big challenge for developing new robotic methods.”

Which sounds like a line from a movie - where the robots stage a surprise takeover.

Here's the story. Good luck, everybody.

 

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