Swarmanoid: Heterogeneous Dynamically Connected Autonomous Robots

Robot 'Mission Impossible' wins video prize - tech - 12 August 2011 - New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20791-robot-mission-impossible-wins-video-prize.html

• In a striking display of military-like precision, the robotic team, dubbed the "Swarmanoid", attacks the problem with flying "eye-bots" and rolling "foot-bots". A "hand-bot" then fires a grappling hook-like device up to the ceiling and scales the bookshelf. Footage of the experiment, conducted by Marco Dorigo at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and colleagues, won the video competition at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco earlier this week

Swarmanoid project
http://www.swarmanoid.org/project_description.php

• Swarm robotics is inspired by the social insect metaphor, and emphasises aspects such as decentralisation of control, limited communication abilities among robots, use of local information, emergence of global behaviour, and robustness. Most current studies in swarm robotic systems have focused on robotic swarms in which individuals are physically and behaviourally undifferentiated.
  
    The Swarmanoid project proposes a highly innovative way to build robots that can successfully and adaptively act in human made environments. The Swarmanoid project will be the first to study how to design, realise and control a heterogeneous swarm robotic system capable of operating in a fully 3-dimensional environment.
  
    The main scientific objective of the proposed research is the design, implementation and control of a novel distributed robotic system comprising heterogeneous, dynamically connected small autonomous robots so as to form what we call a swarmanoid. The swarmanoid that we intend to build will be comprised of numerous (about 60) autonomous robots of three types: eye-bots, hand-bots, and foot-bots.

Swarmanoid project
http://www.swarmanoid.org/swarmanoid_hardware.php

• Eye-bots

  

  
  
  The eye-bot has 8 rotors, arranged in a coaxial quadrotor configuration,   that provide the main lifting force and control. The co-axial arrangement allows for a   smaller size and increased payload capability.

• Hand-bots

  

  
  
  The hand-bot is a fully new concept of robot specilized in both climbing  vertical surfaces and manipulating objects. The hand-bot is not able to move  on the ground (rely for this on the foot-bots and on self-assembling features)  and has a very weak perception of distant environment (rely for this on the  eye-bots)

• Foot-bots

  

  
  
  The foot-bot is a particular configuration of modules based  on the marXbot robotic platform. The foot-bot configuration includes a top  CPU and vision module, a distance scnaner, a range and bearing module, a  self-assembling module and a basic (mobility & battery) module.

Related

• AI's Emmy award goes to Swarmanoid robot book heist
• Mission Impossible, The Robot Version
• Meet Swarmanoid, a cuddly gang of robots who use grappling hooks to rob you
• Swarmanoid robots work together ... to steal books
• Swarmanoid: Towards Humanoid Robotic Swarms | Machines Like Us
• SUPSI - Department of Innovative Technologies - Humanoid Robotic Swarms
• Swarmanoid robots find shortest path over double bridge - YouTube
• Swarmanoid robots find efficient path through adaptive behavior. - YouTube

The I-SWARM Robots Project

Clipped from: Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Tiny Robots

Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Tiny Robots

(PhysOrg.com) -- Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale.


Images of the robots showing their size proportional to various objects. Image credit: Edqvist, et al.

Clipped from: YouTube - I-SWARM Project

I-SWARM Project

Clipped from: I-Swarm

This project combines all: micro-robotics, distributed and adaptive systems as well as self-organising biological swarm systems. It is a technological advance to facilitate the mass-production of micro-robots, which can then be employed as a “real” swarm consisting of more than 100 micro-robot clients. These clients will all be equipped with limited, so-called pre-rational on-board intelligence. The swarm will consist of a huge number of heterogeneous robots, differing in the type of sensors, manipulators and computational power. Such a robot swarm is expected to accomplish a variety of applications and to perform different strategies. With the realisation of three bio-inspired basic scenarios, the swarm will be able to perform dispersion, aggregation and collective perception.

The functions of the agents is reduced to locomotion, integrated tool (one per agent) for permitting basic manipulation and to attach and release other agents, a limited capability to store state information of the agent as well as the possibility to transfer basic information from agent to agent via light.

[...]

The aim of the I-SWARM project is the realisation of a “real” micro-robot swarm. More than one hundred micro-manufactured autonomous robots will be able for the collective execution of different tasks in the small world. This is achieved by:

• by the realisation of collective intelligence of these robots
- in terms of co-operation and
- collective perception
- using knowledge and methods of pre-rational intelligence, machine learning, swarm theory and classical multi-
agent systems

• by the development of advanced micro-robot hardware
- being extremely small (size of a single robot: 3 x 3 x 2 mm3)
- by integrating novel actuators for locomotion, miniaturised powering with micro solar cells and miniaturised
wireless communication
- with ICs for on-board intelligence and
- an integrated sensor and tool for the manipulation in the small world.

Clipped from: YouTube - I-Swarm Micro Robot

Sources:

1. Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Tiny Robots
2. YouTube - I-SWARM Project
3. I-Swarm
4. YouTube - I-Swarm Micro Robot

Related:

1. Tiny I-Swarm robots are perfect for the secret agent in you | DVICE
2. Eeeek, Kill Them!: I-SWARM Robotic Army - Geekologie
3. I-Swarm Micro Robots are Up and Running | Singularity Hub

Robots inspired by animals

Robots inspired by animals, ranging from a robotic salamander and cockroaches to swarms of tiny robots that can be manipulated with electromagnetic forces to create various forms.

clipped from www.youtube.com Robots inspired by animals Robotics researchers are increasingly turning to nature for inspiration. Watch a robotic salamander, a water strider robot, mechanical cockroaches and some cool self-configuring robots. clipped from www.computerworld.com Want to play your favorite video game? Instead of watching characters move around on a computer monitor, why not let them run around your house? This is the vision of the future for Seth Goldstein, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. For the past four years, Goldstein and a team of researchers from CMU, Intel Corp., and the U.S. Air Force Research Lab have been working to create swarms of tiny robots that can be manipulated with electromagnetic forces to create various forms. He explained that the miniscule robots, which one day should be about the size of a grain of sand, basically are shape shifters -clinging together to form various 3D creations. clipped from www.youtube.com Shape-shifting robot forms from magnetic swarm

Related:
New Scientist Technology Blog: Taking inspiration from Nature
Shape-shifting robot swarms will create 3D replicas
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