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Xerox PARC Working On Modular Robots
An reader writes "I was watching Discovery Channel Canada last night, and they had a story about modular robotics that is being researched at Xerox PARC. Rather than build a single, large robot, project leader Mark Yim is working on small, autonomous bots that can work together to achieve a desired goal. When many of this bots are linked together, they call the result a polybot. "
This research project is repackaged swarm robotics. Swarm robots have been around for years. The main problem with swarms is getting the power and leverage to manipulate large objects as the swarm is only as strong as it's weakest link. The main benefit is that they tend to be more fault tolerant than monolithic robots.
See:
Robotics portal
Swarm robotics google search
CMU Robotics Institute
Robot football could be a good inspirational line of thinking for research in polybots. We have several competitions going into robot football. These games will probably contribute to the system design of polybots. The idea here is to have many (more or less) identical robots, who by working together can reach some sort of goal.
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One of the things that have come from robot football events is that the individual robots need some sort of collaborative software to coordinate their efforts. So a polybot would proably benefit from a singe strong computer brain, distributing commands to the individual robots. Other approaches (manly in the nanobot research) move towards a simple set of rules that combined provides the desired effect.
Robot football can easily be found through the search engines, but here are some links:
Competition:
http://www.tech.plym.ac.uk/robofoot/
http://www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/projects/robotfoot
Some research:
http://www.cci.cse.dmu.ac.uk/cci/Projects/footb
-:) Oh no - not again.
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