These swarming robots are insect-like, just like many real-life robots that have been modeled on ants, cockroaches and crickets.

Wilson wrote in a recent article, 'Stumpers typically hide themselves in cold environments and emerge in swarms upon detecting warm, bipedally-walking targets.' The stumpers no sooner reach their target then they self-detonate. The stumpers' behavior is fairly simple by the standards of robotics engineers and yet this robot, described by Wilson as a 'crawling landmine,' could not be more lethal. Wilson installed this same technology in the novel's 'stumper' robots, which are designed to hunt and kill humans. Search-and-rescue robots that exist today are able to identify the location of human targets by the body heat that they generate. Wilson has said that he drew on real-world robotics research in his preparation of the book. The robots, rallied together by a massively powerful AI entity named Archos, achieve world domination by slaughtering and enslaving millions of humans, but the survivors band together to mount an all-out rebellion against these robot tyrants. A domestic robot on a shopping errand attacks and slaughters the workers in a frozen yogurt shop. Sappy, a 'safety and pacification' robot deployed with an American combat unit in Afghanistan, grabs hold of an AK-47 and opens fire on the men in its unit. A baby doll seeks to brainwash a senator's young daughter. A companion robot molded in the likeness of a sweet old woman bites off a piece of its owner's face and then nearly strangles the poor guy to death.

Robopocalypse opens with a series of vignettes in which machines suddenly attack their owners. (Wilson expressed a more positive view of robots in his two other books, A Boy and His Bot and How to Build a Robot Army.) Yet, it seems that Wilson needed to purge underlying misgivings he has about robots in both Robopocalypse and an earlier novel, How to Survive a Robot Uprising. A man who has dedicated himself to the design and construction of robots must be hopeful that these clanking automatons will continue to benefit our lives. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, is serious about robots.

Robopocalypse book 3