TED – In this prophetic talk from 2003, roboticist Rodney Brooks talks about how robots are going to work their way into our lives — starting with toys and moving into household chores … and beyond.

Rodney Brooks builds robots based on biological principles of movement and reasoning. In other words, instead of one giant HAL brain, he might build a swarm of small robots that use trial-and-error to develop intelligence. And it works.

MIT professor Rodney Brooks studies and engineers robot intelligence, looking for the holy grail of robotics: the AGI, or artificial general intelligence. For decades, we’ve been building robots to do highly specific tasks — welding, riveting, delivering interoffice mail — but what we all want, really, is a robot that can figure things out on their own, the way we humans do. (And being able to move around independently would be handy too.)

Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of relatively simple physical robots. The goal of this approach is to study the design of robots (both their physical body and their controlling behaviors) such that a desired collective behavior emerges from the inter-robot interactions and the interactions of the robots with the environment, inspired but not limited by the emergent behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence. It has been discovered that a set of relatively primitive individual behaviors enhanced with communication will produce a large set of complex swarm behaviors.