In these bot hookups, the machines meld their minds

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Meet the first fleet of hive-minded robots.

These robots can latch onto one another and link up their individual “nervous systems” — the network of connections between their computer processors, cameras, wheels and other gadgetry — to create a single-minded machine. The composite robots, reported online September 12 in Nature Communications, pave the way for a new generation of machines that can change their shape on the fly.

In previous robots made up of many smaller machines, each robotic building block maintained control over its own nervous system. It was “a little bit like if we had a bunch of people joining together to do something,” explains study coauthor Marco Dorigo, an engineer at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. “They were trying to coordinate by exchanging messages with neighbors without anyone being in charge.” These multi-bodied robots could link up to create different shapes, unlike solo devices. But the lack of centralized control meant the robot collectives were clumsier and had slower reaction times than stand-alone bots.

The collective robot bodies created by Dorigo and colleagues, however, are helmed by a single member of the group, which the researchers dubbed the “brain unit.” That robot collects sensory data from all the others and controls their operations via Wi-Fi. This centralized decision making “makes sensory-motor control much more efficient,” Dorigo says, regardless of the robot configuration’s size or shape.

Dorigo’s team built 13 robots, which could self-assemble into several arrangements, such as plierlike and salamander-esque shapes. Future robots with this ability to continually reconfigure themselves may be better at navigating different types of terrain, fitting through small openings and performing a wider range of tasks than solo robots with fixed body shapes.