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

Makes a certain amount of sense...

[HiredMan]

Ants are very simple creatures that working collectively in groups to accomplish fairly complicated tasks using mostly smell.

Modeling behavior along these lines and allowing simple creatures to relay very simple state messages with each robot repeating it to others would allow behavior and information to be propagated and acted on even in hostile situations. (Only short range communication is possible for instance.)
ie If the robots are searching for something and one finds the target it could alert the others around it and they could repeat the message and alter their behavior accordingly - if required. Eventually the alert would filter across all robots and reach "home" at which point a response could be propagated back to the successful creature the same way.

If your creatures are too simple there are limitations, however. If you put certain acids on ants other ants will assume they're dead - the smell trigger - and carry them to "dead ant" pile even if they're struggling. The "un-dead" ant will be carried back to the dead ant pile repeatedly until the smell wears off.

=tkk

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.