Pheromone Robotics

An Anonymous Coward writes: "This is the official text I just came across: "The HRL Pheromone Robotics program aims to provide a robust, scalable approach for coordinating actions of large numbers of small scale robots to achieve large scale results in surveillance, reconnaissance, hazard detection, path finding, payload conveyance, and small-scale actuation." But it's the spooky image that grabbed *me*..." Here's some more on the pheromone-sniffing robots pictured, and some more information about making robots that hunt in packs. The page has not been updated for a while, but it's worth seeing.

Comments

Bibliography - Pheromone Computing

[cybrpnk]

Israel A. Wagner's home page about Ants, Robots and Computation is here and it's a great and interesting compilation of data on this topic. Absolutely recommended.

Computational Beauty

[clasher]

For more information on the ability to accomplish complicated tasks with simple rules take a look at this book The Computational Beauty of Nature.

Very informative book, lots of good explanations, diagrams, and the code for his software is available on the website. As a plus he seems to have written the book using free software which he acknowledges at the end of the book). His programs run under linux. He has some very well done graphics (even some dual-image stereograms) which were created with gunplot. I highly recommend this book.

The robots are NOT pheromone SNIFFING

[Incongruity]

The first link mentioned in the story/writeup is not about pheromone sniffing robots persay. If you read the article, the whole idea is called "Pheromone Robotics" because of the similarity to ants and other, similar pheromone using species that the collaborative, distributed system of problem solving utilizing large numbers of independent and relatively simple robots. The robots use "virtual pheromones" to communicate (again this is an illusion to the system of pheromonic communication used by ants etc.

Here's a section from the article that explains basically what I just tried to explain.

Borrowing techniques used by ants and termites, our robots exhibit emergent collaboration. Inspired by the chemical markers used by these insects for communication and coordination, we exploit the notion of a "virtual pheromone," implemented using simple beacons and directional sensors mounted on each robot. Virtual pheromones facilitate simple communication and coordination and require little on-board processing.

I don't mean to be flame bating or anything, I just thought the writeup was a bit confusing/misleading...that or I'm just an idiot and didn't understand what they submitter meant.

"Pheromone Robotics" is not pheromone robotics

[simpsonc6]

I am aware of this project quite a long time, since I'm working on a similar project called "Swarm-Bots" [web site www.swarm-bots.org]. According to me their use of the term "pheromone" is not more than a catchy adjective to label their work. The research, as displayed on their web site, does not take many ideas from the ethological studies of ant colonies. For instance the robots communicate directly with each other, NOT through the environment, which is what ants use pheromone for. To me, it is merely an integration of the dynamic programming technique with mobile robots coupled with VR display interface. For those new to the subject, there is a new approach, called "swarm intelligence" that aims to create intelligent systems from a group of distributed simple agents. An excellent description of this approach is available in the "Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems By Eric Bonabeau, Marco Dorigo, and Guy Theraulaz" . In this approach, the agents communicate through the environment, called stigmergy, to achieve group level tasks. There is no centralized control, yet the whole system is very scalable and robust. I hope to report some news on the progress of the Swarm-Bots soon.