Teams of robots that can remotely tap into each other's sensors and computers in order to perform tricky tasks have been developed by researchers in Sweden. The robots can, for example, negotiate their way past awkward obstacles by relaying different viewpoints to one another.

Robert Lundh, who developed the bots at Örebro University, says cooperative behaviour is normally rigidly pre-programmed into robots. "We wanted to have the robots plan for themselves how to draw on their capabilities and those of others," he told New Scientist.

Lundh's robots decide whether another nearby robot may be able to help with a specific task. In one experiment two round robots, each 45 centimetres in diameter and 25 cm tall, teamed up to negotiate their way through a doorway. They were forced to cooperate because each robot's vision system had been limited so that it could not see enough of the doorway to be certain of getting through without hitting the sides.

Stereo vision

The first robot determined that it needed to wirelessly access the camera of its partner and then navigated through the doorway using both its own camera and that of its colleague. Once through the door, it turned around and returned the favour, helping the second one through by providing a wider field of view.

"Our system allows robots to start with a task, extract which capabilities are needed and find out where to access them," Lundh explains. "If you don't have the capabilities on your own you have to search for them."

Another experiment involved a pair of robots carrying one length of wood balanced on each of their heads. One of the robots tapped into information about the other's speed and direction to keep the beam balanced correctly.

Flexible teams

The strength of the system, says Lundh, is that the robots can adapt their teamwork to the task in hand, and to the availability of potential team mates. "Humans don't exist in fixed teams," he says. "They cooperate as needed."

Ken Young, a robotics expert at Warwick University in the UK, believes it makes sense to model robot cooperation on that of humans. He adds that teams of small robots should be more effective than large individual ones. "Humans regularly work together and combine skills to perform tasks not possible alone," he told New Scientist. "That's an obvious route forward for robots as well."

Lundh hopes to test the new system within an "intelligent home" filled with cameras and radio frequency tags that mark specific locations. The bots could then tap into these systems as well.