Car Wars Episode II: Attack of the Cones

From Boing Boing comes news of a terrible horror: Self-propelled swarming robot traffic cones.

The new road markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a bid to help reduce the $100 billion per year that the Department of Transportation estimates is lost to the US economy through accidents and delays caused by highway lane closures.

The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones. Farritor says they can open and close traffic lanes faster and more safely than humans.

That's what they want you to believe: they're really a wave of attack from an alien life form; trying to strangle our lines of communication.

Perhaps they're even early prototype versions of Daleks: the sink plungers of doom and the killer egg whisks will come later.