Swarm Behaviour - Robotics

Robotics

Main article: Swarm robotics See also: Ant robotics

The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm robotics, while swarm intelligence refers to the more general set of algorithms.

Inspired by colonies of insects such as ants and bees, researchers are modelling the behaviour of swarms of thousands of tiny robots which together perform a useful task, such as finding something hidden, cleaning, or spying. Each robot is quite simple, but the emergent behaviour of the swarm is more complex. The whole set of robots can be considered as one single distributed system, in the same way an ant colony can be considered a superorganism, exhibiting swarm intelligence. The largest swarms so far created include the iRobot swarm, the SRI International/ActivMedia Robotics Centibots project, and the Open-source Micro-robotic Project swarm, which are being used to research collective behaviours. Swarms are also more resistant to failure. Whereas one large robot may fail and ruin a mission, a swarm can continue even if several robots fail. This could make them attractive for space exploration missions, where failure is normally extremely costly.

The I-Swarm project aims to develop a large scale swarm of up to 1,000 small microrobots, about 2 x 2 x 1 mm in size. The small size means that sensory and computational capabilities will be limited. This will be compensated for by the emergent swarm effects. The robots operate on solar power and can communicate between each other. The robots will differ in the type of sensors, manipulators and the amount of computational power. The swarm is expected to have many applications, including micro assembly, biological, medical or cleaning tasks.