At least the SRL robots respected Asimov’s First Law at the SRL event and weren’t responsible for any human injuries suffered there. That may not be true of DARPA’s new spawn. The research arm of the US military just gave Icosystems a contract to program a battalion of 120 military robots previously built by I-Robot with a swarm intelligence software upgrade to enable them to mimic the organised behavior of insects. Eric Bonabeau, chief scientist for Icosystems, concedes it is possible that some unforeseen circumstance could throw the robots into chaos. “There may be some pathological configurations and we need to investigate that,” he says. “But I think that it applies to virtually every man made system that has to operate in the real world.” Remind you of anything?

Finally, Steve Potter (no relation to Harry – we hope) of Georgia Tech has introduced the Hybrot, a small robot that moves about using the brain signals of a rat. Hybrot is the first robotic device whose movements are controlled by a network of cultured neuron cells and was built using a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Potter is connecting laboratory cultures containing living neurons to computers in order to create a simulated animal, which he describes as a “neurally-controlled animat.” “We call it the ‘Hybrot’ because it is a hybrid of living and robotic components,” he said. “We hope to learn how living neural networks may be applied to the artificial computing systems of tomorrow. We also hope that our findings may help cases in which learning, memory, and information processing go awry in humans.”

And in case you’re wondering where all of this is going to lead…