Swarm robots, known as droplets

Robots that look more like ping pong balls could one day help to colonize Mars, so thinks their developer. The robots would work together in swarms of thousands to construct habitats for humans and perform gardening tasks.

The ping pong bots, or, “droplets” as they are known by their creator Nikolaus Correll, an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, are still in the prime of their development. The 20 that have been built so far have RGB color and infrared sensing, get around with vibrating motors and communicate via wireless. Down the road Correll hopes to have a completely autonomous swarm robot platform through distributed sensing, actuation, computation and communication that can be used for just about any kind of remote sensing or even construction tasks.

Original link: http://www.colorado.edu/cs/2012/12/14/cu-boulder-team-develops-swarm-pingpong-ball-sized-robots