Giving Compass' Take:

• This story from Futurity looks at the potential for swarms of small, cheap robots to take over numerous jobs, such as cleaning up oil spills.

• What other industries might be affected by swarm robotics? What are the potential consequences for workers in those industries, and how might the nonprofit sector mitigate those consequences.

• To learn about how we could use robots in education, click here.

Imagine there’s a flock of aerial robots searching for a lost hiker, for example. They have to cover a large area of remote bush and a central commander won’t work because they’re so spread out.

So, instead, the robots work cooperatively to calculate the best way to cover and search this large area accurately and speedily.

This scenario is less Black Mirror than it sounds, and more about focusing on practical solutions for jobs that are difficult for humans to do, says Airlie Chapman from the Melbourne School of Engineering.

Describing the focus of her research in mechatronic engineering, Chapman says “it centers on multi-vehicle robotics, or many robots working together to achieve a common goal”.

Mechatronic engineers explore developments in automation and manufacturing—blending multiple disciplines of engineering. And it can involve creating smart machines that are aware of their surroundings and can make autonomous decisions.

Chapman works specifically in the field of multi-vehicle, or swarm, robotics. Using a combination of mechanical, electrical, and software engineering to build the robots, Chapman then programs the vehicles using algorithms to react and think autonomously.

“There are benefits to using many smaller unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in place of one large one, particularly for job like cleaning up an oil spill, environmental monitoring, or searching for survivors of a mine collapse,” says Chapman.

Not only is there the element of redundancy with smaller vehicles—losing one small UAV out of a group is less of a problem than losing a single large UAV—but there are also the implementation benefits. For one thing, there’s the improved coverage capability and reduced cost.

“A swarm of cheap small robots, each with little capability, can replace one costly highly-capable robot,” she says.

Read the full article about swarm robotics by University of Melbourne at Futurity