Dive Brief:

• There may come a day when a swarm of robots shuttle around construction sites, grabbing materials and assembling buildings the way termites build their tunnels.
• Scientists have learned that termites lay down scent trails that allow individual insects that know only their own tasks to collaborate by doing their tasks in a way that produces what the group needs.
• The robots, called TERMES, that engineers built in Harvard's Self-organizing Systems Research group, swarm about picking up pieces to assemble into structures bigger than any one of them.

Dive Insight:

Each of the robots is about the size of a desk telephone, and they use a process that scientists call stigmergy, which is organisms using markers laid down by preceding ones to "know" what task to perform where. It's a simple enough concept that no one robot needs much computing power, though it takes a lot more to build the plan that guides them.