According to a press release (9 January 2002), NASA researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California have successfully demonstrated the first use of multiple rovers that work tightly in sync to perform tasks such as coordinated grasping, lifting and moving of an extended payload, while navigating through obstacles on natural terrain. The JPL researchers say the rovers function much like a construction crew without a foreman. They note that once the system has been programmed with basic behaviors and coordination models, it is a truly distributed and autonomous intelligence across the robot team that gets the job done, responding to situations of the minute
For more information, visit the JPL Robot Work Crew website.
