June 03, 2004
Robot Swarms in the News
Fortune magazine does a profile of the SwarmBots over at iRobot. Since I am doing some research in this area, I thought that I would link to the article. Basically, a number of cheap robots with fairly unsophisticated rules about how to behave can demonstrate some impressive behavior at the swarm level.
Insects make great conceptual models for cheap robots because they have simple local interactions with one another that nonetheless add up to very complicated group behaviors, such as building a hive or foraging for nectar. The whole, in other words, is greater than the sum of its parts. iRobot's SwarmBots are cubes measuring five inches on each side. They have rechargeable nicad batteries and a pair of electric motors inside, along with a microprocessor and some associated circuitry. A "bump skirt" helps the robots sense and avoid crashing into obstacles. Each has a small color camera for simple object recognition, as well as sensors that detect light. Communications between robots are handled by an array of infrared transmitters and receivers similar to the ones used in TV remote controls.
The iRobot researchers conduct a charming SwarmBot demo in foam-board corrals arranged on a carpeted office floor. It simulates exploring an unfamiliar interior environment, much as commandos would when storming a building. These little devils are efficient, in the computational sense; the software that's needed to run the robots through the exploration routine occupies just 60 kilobytes of memory, the equivalent of a medium-sized Microsoft Word file. Musical tones and flashing red, blue, and green LEDs that look like plump, luminous gumdrops atop the robots keep the humans clued in to what the members of the swarm are doing. A red light means a robot is seeking to maintain uniform spacing from its neighbors. Blue signals that a robot is moving into unexplored territory. Green indicates that a robot is heading back to the charging dock to top off its batteries. Robots showing all three colors at once have detected an object and are "guarding" it. Watching all that helps the observers identify bugs (pardon the expression) in the evolving software and devise fixes. The computer code is designed to work with as few as ten robots and as many as 10,000.
Very cool stuff.
Posted by elkaim at June 3, 2004 12:40 PM