This is an interesting concept. I didn’t know Harvard had an Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, but it’s a great idea. Animals, insects specifically, are great at amazing feats of engineering, and now researchers there have developed robots that can work as a collective to build structures, in a similar vein to how ants or termites build theirs.

It may not sound like a big deal, but ant and termite mounds are wonders of the natural world. They are built without any plan, and by insects of course, but they have ventilation, heat re-direction, greenhouses, nurseries, and a complex series of non-random passageways. If one can’t function the building goes on without her and they often even sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony.

Honestly, all large structures are built the same way by humans, but they need a plan. If you watch the construction of any building there are numerous people crawling all over the place to get it done. Imagine if robots could be used instead to build complex structures.

These researchers didn’t provide the robots with a plan, rather they gave them a basic set of rules and the robots were able to build complex structures using only the rules that defined the end goal. It’s a difficult ting to explain, but the video below explains it in more detail and shows the robots moving blocks in to place. It’s surprisingly interesting to see.

Not that they would be used to replace humans, they would be used in situations where it would be dangerous for humans to be. As the article states, if structures needed to be built underwater or on the surface of another planet, these robots would be ideal.