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Cyberbees Score MIT Prize
DeAshcroft writes "The Boston Globe has a nice story on the winner of this year's Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. 125 infrared-communicating 4.5-inch swarming bee-like robots. Businessweek even covered this one here.
Next year's prize may go to the creator of 4.5-inch long swarming cockroaches."
First, I read the post, which talked about 'Bee-like robots', and was impressed. Making anything that flies under its own power and contains some kind of logic is pretty clever, and incorporating swarming algorithms is even better. Then I read the article (yes, I know this is /., I'm sorry, it won't happen again). I don't know about the US, but in the UK bees have wings, and fly. These were just ground crawlers. About 3 years ago, I saw something similar at Oxford Uuniversity, I think it was an undergrad's final year project. They used slightly bigger robots, but the principle is the same. This really isn't a new idea, and does not merit a prize. Flocking algorithms have been around for ages (we had to study them as part of a second year course) and small robots can by bought in Toys 'R' Us. Combining the two would be a good high-school project, but there's nothing particularly original in this work (at least as portrayed by the article).
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Aye, but it's one thing to have the idea, another to actually knuckle down and make it work.
> The idea of complex adaptive systems composed of a swarm of simple nodes with very simple rules is neither new or interesting in and of itself.
There is a lot of new and interesting stuff going on in that area, tho'
last week's "Nature" (vol 421, p 780) had a news feature on how systems of multiple units achieve synchrony ;
check out Steve Strogatz work ;
read Arthur Winfree's book "The Geometry of Biological Time" (Springer-Verlag 1980) [OK, not so new ...]
This stuff isn't so obvious. Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch physicist, couldn't get the Royal Society to pay attention to his observation that two pendulum clocks hanging on the same wooden beam eventually adopted the same rhythm. That was in 1665. Next stop : the 1960s, when Winfree started looking at coupled oscillators as an explanation for fireflies synchronizing their flashes. Still plenty of stuff to find out here.
I for one don't begrudge a student winning a prize for this.