Watch Penn’s robot boats on a rescue mission [VIDEO]

Last year, Penn‘s flying robots, or quadrotors, played the James Bond theme. Now a new set of Penn robot boats are carrying out rescue missions.

From a team led by Penn engineering professors Vijay Kumar and Mark Yim, these robots are part of a military intelligence project that’s trying to figure out how to use robots as disaster responders. The robots were built at Penn’s robotics research GRASP Lab.

From Penn’s website:

Similar to work with the GRASP Lab‘s quadrotors, Kumar and Yim are trying to figure out how to give swarms of robots general instructions on how and where to move. The team wants each robot to determine how to best accomplish its task without getting in the way of the other autonomous boats. The researchers have built a fleet of 100 scale model robotic boats, each about a foot-and-a-half long, and are testing them in a pool to improve the algorithms that control this collective behavior.

Read more here.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_Tb6SCTyy8]