In a striking display of military-like precision, the “Swarmanoid” robotic team attacks the problem of finding and retrieving a book with flying “eye-bots” and rolling “foot-bots; a “hand-bot” then fires a grappling hook-like device up to the ceiling and scales the bookshelf.

Footage of the experiment, conducted by Marco Dorigo at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium and colleagues, won the video competition at the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence last week.

In the future, Dorigo says, swarm-robot teams could be tasked with more difficult and important tasks, such as firefighting.

[ New Scientist ]