Robots as Actors in a Film: No War, A Robot Story

Abstract

Will the Third World War be fought by robots? This short film is a light-hearted comedy that aims to trigger an interesting discussion and reflexion on the terrifying killerrobot stories that increasingly fill us with dread when we read the news headlines. The fictional scenario takes inspiration from current scientific research and describes a future where robots are asked by humans to join the war. Robots are divided, sparking protests in robot society... will robots join the conflict or will they refuse to be employed in human warfare? Food for thought for engineers, roboticists and anyone imagining what the upcoming robot revolution could look like. We let robots pop on camera to tell a story, taking on the role of actors playing in the film, instructed through code on how to "act" for each scene.

The Hidden Benefits of Limited Communication and Slow Sensing in Collective Monitoring of Dynamic Environments

“…For our experiments, we use Kilobots which are cheap, simple, and small robots widely employed in swarm robotics [21,22,31,20]. By regulating the frequency of two vibration motors, the Kilobots move on a flat surface at speeds of about 1 cm /s in roughly straight motion and rotate at the spot at about 45 • /s.…”