[It's not enough to have a *normal* droid anymore, they have to be "super"...]

Superbots, Self-Reconfigurable Robots
Technology News Daily
(04/28/08)

University of Southern California researchers continue to
make improvements to self-reconfigurable superbots. The researchers describe
superbots as versatile, self-healing, metamorphic machines that are inexpensive
to duplicate, and add that the direction of their research is influenced by
nature and biologically-inspired approaches. "We use a distributed framework
inspired by the biological concept of hormones," says SuperBot team leader Dr.
Wei-Men Shen. "In this digital hormone framework, modules are viewed as
autonomous agents or cells that are nameless, but communicate and reconfigure
with hormone-like messages to perform locomotion, manipulation,
self-reconfiguration, and self-healing." One focus of the research is to improve
the robots' prediction capabilities and to develop algorithms that allow for
"surprise-based learning." The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR),
which is funding the research, believes the project could have some key
implications f or future warfighters. NASA, which has a SuperBot program of its
own, also plans to make use of the results of the AFOSR-funded project.
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