Harvard University scientists have devised a swarm of 1,024 tiny robots that can work together without any category_iding central intelligence. <\/p>\n
The Wall St. Journal on MSN MoneyLike a mechanical flash mob, these robots can assemble themselves into five-pointed stars, letters of the alphabet and other complex designs. The researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported their work Thursday in Science. <\/p>\n
“No one had really built a swarm of this size before, where everyone works together to achieve a goal,” said robotics researcher Michael Rubenstein, who led the project.<\/p>\n
While still experimental, such armadas of self-organizing robots one day may aid in oil spill cleanups, deep-sea ventures, military surveillance and planetary exploration.<\/p>\n
Swarm scientists are inspired by nature’s team players — social insects like bees, ants and termites; schools of fish; and flocks of birds. These creatures collaborate in vast numbers to perform complicated tasks, even though no single individual is actually in charge.<\/p>\n
Driver ants, for example, live together in colonies of 20 million or more. The ants are blind. Yet they work together to forage for food, category_ided by chemical signals, smell and touch.<\/p>\n
Among such social insects, that team spirit is hard-wired into the genetic code.<\/p>\n
To give robots that kind of hive intelligence, Dr. Rubenstein and his colleagues developed a programming formula that allowed a very large group of robots to find each other and collaborate on a task, without requiring detailed moment-to-moment instructions.<\/p>\n
The researchers used inexpensive robots called Kilobots created by Wyss Institute engineers and licensed to a Swiss robotics company called K-Team Corp. Each one is about the diameter of a penny, with a small microprocessor, an infrared sensor, and vibration motors to move it along. <\/p>\n
As programmed, each robot knows three things: how to follow the edge of a group; how to track its distance from where it had started; and how to maintain a sense of its relative position.<\/p>\n
A single command, beamed to them all simultaneously via infrared, sets the process in motion.<\/p>\n
In theory, there is no limit on the size, scale or complexity of a robot swarm. “It could automatically change shape to adapt to the task at hand,” Dr. Rubenstein said. “You could have them build other robots out of themselves.”<\/p>\n
“The beauty of biological systems is that they are elegantly simple and yet, in large numbers, accomplish the seemingly impossible,” said Harvard computer scientist Radhika Nagpal.<\/p>\n
SOURCE: http:\/\/money.msn.com\/technology-investment\/post–harvard-scientists-develop-swarm-of-robots Remains<\/strong>
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