In the prestigious video competition of the International Conference of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2016), known as the “Oscars of Artificial Intelligence”, the Portuguese project from IT and the University of Lisbon took home the award for “Best Robot Video”.

A Sea of Robots was exhibited in the AAAI Video Competition Award Ceremony, held in Phoenix, USA, on February 15 and, for IT researcher Anders Christensen, "The video is the culmination of a lot of hard work. It was a privilege to show the video at the prestigious conference and an honour to receive the Best Robot Video award. My team and I are now more motivated than ever to push our research forward!"

This short film documents the work of researchers Anders Christensen, Sancho Oliveira, Miguel Duarte, Vasco Costa, Jorge Gomes, Tiago Rodrigues, and Fernando Silva, in developing a swarm of intelligent aquatic robots that learn to cooperate with each other to complete missions in a completely autonomous way. Researchers took inspiration from nature to develop this aquatic swarm, and used algorithms that imitate Darwin´s Theory of Evolution to create artificial intelligence that controls each unit automatically.
With an approximate cost of 300€ per unit, a swarm can accomplish various collective tasks such as monitoring an area, navigate in a pack, aggregation and dispersion.