Another video from Stockholm University’s Mobile Life Centre in Kista, Sweden. Here we see a family of GlowBots, tiny round robots that run around and connect with each other. When you “select” one robot with a pattern you like by shaking it, the robot goes on to infect other robots with the general pattern, mutating it as the pattern enters the environment. These little guys are about a year old so they’re not quite feeling well but some of them worked correctly and passed their DNA on to other robots. The project is actually based on lizard breeding.
They used these little fellows in real life interaction tests with families with little kids. They also seeded Pleos into the wild to see how children and adults interact with “intelligent” robots. The results were fairly interesting: the kids really wanted to stack the robots, resulting in broken bases, and they liked to use the GlowBots as a base for their action figures.