A sharp-lookingtabletop touchscreencan be used to command robots and combine data from various sources, potentially improving military planning, disaster response and search-and-rescue operations. Mark Micire, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, proposes using Surface, Microsoft's interactive tabletop, to unite various types of data, robots and other smart technologies around a common goal. Indefending his graduate thesisearlier this week, Micire showed off a demo of his swarm-control interface, which you can watch below. To test his system, Micire steered a four-wheeled vehicle through a plywood maze.Control This Robot With a Touchscreen: Mark Micire/UMass Lowell Robotics Lab The system can integrate a variety of data sets, like city maps, building blueprints and more.