Bluetooth is finally taking off. Literally. A small robotic blimp floats gently through the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, wirelessly interacting with a desktop computer to literally evolve its own navigation software without human intervention. What the blimp sees via its onboard sensors is Bluetoothed to the PC for processing. The artificially evolved "brains" are then transmitted back to the mylar blimp so it can intelligently fly through its environment, improving with each run. While Bluetooth has been slow to catch on for mainstream applications, engineers in many research labs and garages around the world are leveraging the wireless technology for future generations of small mobile robots and "self-deploying" sensor networks. "Until recently, Bluetooth has been a bit confusing for consumers," says Bryan Hall, a professional Bluetooth engineer at A7 Engineering and robotics hobbyist. "In the laboratory though, people are more willing to put up with tech warts. So you can now get these sensory devices running around relatively quickly and spend your time writing complex applications for them." As an inexpensive wireless option, Bluetooth provides many advantages for robotics designers over other standards. First of all, it's low-power, so it doesn't guzzle batteries like many other wireless technologies.  That's important, say, for small robots where every ounce counts -- an aerobot, for example, like the blimp or the Bluetooth-equipped microrobotic helicopter recently demonstrated by Seiko Epson Corporation. Bluetooth is also robust. The specification smartly contains several schemes that confirm whether a data packet made it to its destination untainted, and resends it if not. This gives roboticists the peace-of-mind that their machines can chit-chat uninterrupted as long as they're in range of one another. More here ... Source: The Feature