I've got a book (I bought for my daughter) which is the sorcerer's apprentice, but where the sorcerer is an inventor, and the apprentice is a robot that is told to clean up the lab ... it creates a copy of itself, which creates a copy, etc as per the disney thing.

Funny how life imitates art.

Cheers, Marcin

So is that the correct collective noun then? How about a suck of vacbots?

Any (obviously better) suggestions?

N.B. I'll head this off at the pass: Researcher A: "Herd of vacbots?" Researcher B: "Of course I have, I read robots.net!"

I guess "Gaggle" means "Flock". So the thought of a flock of vacbots flying overhead might could make a cheezy B-Movie horror flick? Sort of like that Star Wars spoof call hardware wars? Look up in the sky! AHHHH is a gaggle of vacbots! Wha? It's a flock of Vacbots! Wha? It's a bunch of vacbots! For goodness sake, who cares what it is just run for your lives!!! [Morbid image if victims being sucked into the mother ship]

Would a vaccuum robot, by itself, be a collective noun? Tee-hee...

I've always thought a group of geese was a gaggle. At least that's how my dad refered to them.

We've got two Roombas, which my wife has named "Judy" and "Elroy".

What a coincedence! I found an article that used the word gaggle in describing a bunch of electronic instruments. Perhaps they read robots.net and were inspired to use the word?

Yes, it's a gaggle of geese. There are lots of collective nouns in English. Some of them are used everyday, but many of them have poetic, or comic origins.

a flock of sheep; a herd of cows; a business of ferrets; a fall of woodcocks; a shrewdness of apes; a cete of badgers; a dopping of sheldrake; a tiding of magpies; an unkindness of ravens; a parliament of rooks; a murder of crows; a murmuration of starlings; a drunkship of cobblers; an eloquence of lawyers; a superfluity of nuns; a pride of lions; a pack of dogs; a flight of stairs; a flock of birds; a string of racehorses; a kettle of hawks;

There's a book on the subject by James Lipton called "An Exaltation of Larks" that is filled with them. I haven't read it. I doubt anyone with Internet access really needs to. ;)

I'm a firm believer in the meaning of language being determined by use, but there seems to be no real consensus on robots. It depends on the architecture. Some robots come in "teams" but that is a specialist use of the phrase. You can find "teams" in other animals, like within a troop of baboons. Similarly I've seen "flocks" and "swarms" of robots. This is more based on the animals that the robot is emulating than anything else. So, I'm interested in what we might call a collective of vacbots, since "vacbot" already tells us more than "robot."