2011-04-22

Swarming Robots

YouTube - Robots with a mind of their own

Scientists are now building a new kind of robot capable of self-assembly and doing tasks too difficult or too dangerous for human beings.



Swarm intelligence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.[1]

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The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while 'swarm intelligence' refers to the more general set of algorithms. 'Swarm prediction' has been used in the context of forecasting problems.

Swarm robotics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs.


Symbiotic Evolutionary Robot Organisms (SYMBRION)



[...]  such artificial organisms will become self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting from hardware and software points of view. This may lead not only to extremely adaptive, evolvable and scalable robotic systems, but might also enable the robot organisms to reprogram themselves without human supervision; to develop their own cognitive structures and, finally, to allow new functionality to emerge: the most suitable for the given situation.


EPFL - Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) - Prof. Dario Floreano



The SMAVNET project aims at developing swarms of flying robots that can be deployed in disaster areas to rapidly create communication networks for rescuers. Flying robots are interesting for such applications because they are fast, can easily overcome difficult terrain, and benefit from line-of-sight communication.


Autonomous Swarming Robots Can Skim Sea Surface, Collecting Oil As A Team | Popular Science



Swarms of autonomous, solar-powered towel-bots, based on a nanowire mesh, could help those oil-eating microbes clean up the Gulf of Mexico. The “Seaswarm” robot moves like a tank in water, using a conveyor belt to roll over the ocean’s surface.


Robot Swarms Could Help Search for Life in Martian Caves | Wired Science | Wired.com



Autonomous swarming robots, programmed to search like honeybees, could be the best strategy to explore caves on Mars that may harbor life.


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