The trend in robotics research surrounds creating autonomous and life-like robots for human needs. Breazel and Scasselati (2002) believe that these machines should be able to “acquire new knowledge autonomously and become increasingly more complex and capable with the assistance of a person” (Breazeal & Scasselati 2002, p. 481). The benefits of such technology could mean exploration and searching in rescue operations is possible (Basilica & Amigoni 2011), or keeping track of moving objects or people using radio (Hollinger et al. 2011). However, autonomous robots have a negative social response encouraged by movies like Transformers and Wall-E, which show robotic technology taking over earth.

One of the areas of autonomous robotic development is in swarm robots, a system of robots which reorganise their spatial configuration to address a certain problem. These robots have the potential to work alongside rescue operations teams to locate people, retrieve bodies and even heal wounded humans in collapsed buildings. Correll and Grob (2010) recognise that these “Swarm-intelligent systems are common throughout nature” (Correll & Grob 2010, p. 785) and people are trying to emulate these to serve human problems. This video shows the trialling of swarm robots on moving a human child, which is one of the ways to test if using swarm robots in emergency situations is viable. The robots are seen to connect themselves together to move this child across the floor.

As much as this technology has the potential to be helpful in dire and dangerous situations, they also have the potential to become extremely dangerous themselves, reflecting the ideas of Kling et al. (2005) and Sawyer and Eschenfelder (2002). They believe that technological have endless adverse effects that are unpredictable and wide-spreading. This emphasises the importance of the social informatics field to contain and predict the social effects of and on technology.