The Swarmbots Are Coming

Roland Piquepaille writes "For its latest issue, Wired Magazine asked several experts to tell us how the convergence between technology and biology was transforming their respective fields, from transportation to art, and even redefining life as we know it. In this special report, Living Machines, you'll discover that the nonliving world is very much alive. This summary is focused on one of the seven articles, which talks about ant algorithms and swarmbots. "Typically, a swarm bot is a collection of simple robots (s-bots) that self-organize according to algorithms inspired by the bridge-building and task-allocation activities of ants." And ant algorithms are used today to solve human problems especially in distribution and logistics."

A good intro to AI...

[tcopeland]

...including ant algorithms, simulated annealing, and fuzzy logic is M. Tim Jones' AI Application Programming [charlesriver.com].

The examples are especially helpful; they're written in nice portable C. I've been working on a little project to translate them to Ruby [ruby-lang.org]; porting notes and Gnuplot charts and such are here [rubyforge.org] and the code for the Ant Algorithm translation is here [rubyforge.org].

Ant reference

[IchBinDasWalross]

Mute Filesharing [sourceforge.net] is one of the projects talking about ant technology, with a pretty thorough description [sourceforge.net] of how they use AntTech.

The house of next tuesday...

[Epyn]

The fascination with miniature robotics really amuses me, with its extremely costly and seemingly pointless projects. I know theyre not pointless/useless, but I'd think theyd get a better public response if they were building larger-scale, more prototype-like systems that had an end result. As opposed to the classic (in my mind) tiny mouse robot that followed around light sources.
Although I suppose micronizing is where to be...if you plan to sell your immediate research.

Smart Dust

[pararox]

This reminds me of an article in the new "Innovators Section" as seen in Time magazine (January 12th '04 edition).

Essentially, it discusses Kris Pister who developed Smart Dust - a wireless network of sensors, called motes. Each mote has a chip about the size of a grain of rice that detects and records things like termperature and motion at its location. The motes have minisule radio transmitters that talk to otehr motes. With a single network of 10,000 motes, the upper limit, you could cover some 9 sq. miles - and get information about each point along the way!

Anyway, here's a brief description:
innovationwatch.com [innovationwatch.com]

Here is the Dust, Inc. homepage:
http://www.dust-inc.com/

Frightening technology in many respects, but I can't help but smile at the thought of the brilliance behind it all.

Regards,
-pararox-

Re:Emergence

[PrionPryon]

This book [amazon.com] is worth a trip to the library. It was my introduction when I was first intrigued. Also, Godel, Escher, Bach [amazon.com] speaks to the same concepts as well as others.

Re:Categories and Organisms

[iminplaya]

...collection of single celled symbiotic organisms...

Jelly fish are often decsribed this way. I like to think they're pretty much like other animals, but their "nervous system" is a bit more decentralized.

bittorrent

[Pzykotic]

haha so wait, this is like the organic version of bittorrent?

send 10000 of these things to take a tiny piece of something and then they can rebuild it! mwahaha!

bring one.... one cow! go swarmbots!

maybe my ideas should be more gregarious, but eh. I'm selfish.

Hi from an of the Swarmbot developper

[nctysagoon.com]

Hi,

I'm one of the Swarmbot developper. I have been in charge of porting Linux to the motherboard of thwe s-bot as well as writing its system software. Let's have some interesting data about the s-bot :

• 9 degrees of freedom (2 wheels, turret rotation, elevation of gripper (can lift another s-bot), gripper (have 1.5 kg of pressure), mobile arm (3 dof), mobile gripper)
• 19 IR sensors (15 around, 4 bottom)
• 2D camera
• 4 microphones, 2 loudspeakers
• light ring (8 RGB) and light sensors (8)
• torque and speed sensors on major dof
• accelerometer and structural deformation sensors
• 2 temperature and humidity sensors
• 13 PIC uC for local computation
• One homemade 400 MHz X-Scale CPU board
• Wifi
• 700 g, 2 hours autonomy

Direct links :
http://www.swarm-bots.org [swarm-bots.org]
http://lsa1pc65.epfl.ch/research/projects/SwarmBot s/index.php [lsa.epfl.ch]

Have a nice day,

Steph