UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mother Nature holds many secrets, even about robots. And James McLurkin is using the swarm project to reveal them.</s>JAMES MCLURKIN, MIT, GRADUATE STUDENT: Then inspiration for the swarm comes from nature. Ants, bees, termites. All these insects produce very complicated group rejaviers.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And as these group behaviors that McLurkin is looking to imitate by creating software he hopes to understand how to program large numbers of robots to perform tasks that are complicated and dangerous for humans.</s>MCLURKIN: You have an earthquake; this is the task that humans are particularly ill suited for. We can have 20,000 cockroach sized robots and they scurry through the pile looking for survivors and they send a signal out to get a rat size structural near and then that robot will assess the structure site of the building. Figure out how to pull the rubble off the survivor. It is almost impossible for us to do now with current technology.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: McLurkin the 2003 winner of the $30,000 Lemalson MIT student prize says there are still many technical issues to be worked out like power sources for these energy hungry robots.
Robots Built For Human Tasks