Profile: James McLurkin
Engineer James McLurkin designs robot "swarms"—groups of robots that work together for a greater purpose.
(This video is no longer available for streaming.) James McLurkin is an award-winning robotics engineer who gets inspiration from an unlikely source: his ant farm. Each ant is a simple creature with simple rules governing its behavior, yet the colony as a whole performs complex tasks—a lesson McLurkin has adapted to develop a swarm of disposable robots for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Meet the man—and his ants—in this video.