A team of researchers replicate the hive behaviors of schools of fish in robots
Research is being conducted at the
Sheffield Center for Robotics to develop fundamental
artificial intelligence that could someday have military,
medical, and industrial applications.
Dr. Roderich Gross, head of the natural robotics lab,
says his team has been working to program 40 robots to
accomplish tasks as a collective swarm.
Gross believes that the robot hive can perform more advanced
tasks and venture into situations unsuitable for humans. The
team of scientist has already demonstrated the swarm’s
ability to gather around an object and move it.
What can they do?
Pushing is carried out by swarm's need to uncover a
target object and the assumption that it lurks behind any
object in their path. This creates a carrot-on-a-stick loop
that forces the swarm to repeatedly push the object in a
vain attempt to find its target. This mechanic is very
simple and thus raises the question, as Dr. Gross' puts it,
"is less more?" In military circumstances, the technique has
vast potential for saving human lives by using machines to
perform reconnaissance missions, remove deadly explosives,
or even perform hostage-rescue operations.
Aggregation
In the first series of experiments, Gross' team
outfitted the robots with very basic components, essentially
disabling their ability to compute arithmetic, in order to
establish the minimum information needed by the robots to
aggregate.
With that said, the programming used by his team is very
simple: a robot will use its proximity sensors to check if
another unit is near; if so, it turns on the spot; if not,
it moves in a wider circle until it finds another unit. The
importance of the experiment lies in that the robots may not
need any memory or processing units, and could thus be
simplified. The simpler the technology, the more realistic
it is to recreate on a nanoscale for medical applications,
using microscopic machines to treat ailments inside the
body.
Segregation
Additionally, Dr. Gross' team simulated segregation among
the swarm by programming the robots to behave like loosely
fitting particles to behave much like those inside a shaken
bag of cereal — the larger particles move to the top and the
smaller ones move toward the bottom. The robots are assigned
three different colors and move randomly to embody vibrating
particles; they are also attracted to a light source used to
represent gravity.
The ability to move heavy resources has been paramount in
the construction of everything from the pyramids to
modern-day skyscrapers, and robot swarms may have a hand in
automating this process given the research is very general
and thus flexible.