This is very sour for a bitter man. I worked at Magna back then and Prof Sharkey's robots made a great show until the funding ran out. He did not have a couple of students on the project. There was large funding for 5 post doctoral staff and the built all of the robots and used genetic algorithms to program them. Almost half a million visitor came to see them in their first year.
It was a robot food chain with 15 small prey robots getting their energy with solar panels - they had to find light trees to recharge. Then bigger predator robots hunted the prey and sucked about half their battery power. It was fascinating and there was a lot of media attention in 2001 with a lot of film footage around at the time. I will try to locate some.
Eventually the funding ran out and lay offs at Magna meant that there were no staff to maintain them - they started falling apart and the prof asked the exhibition to be shut down.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
