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Cyberbees Score MIT Prize

Posted by timothy on from the to-avoid-the-sting dept.

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."

4 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. metrobots by suhit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How about the Metrobots that are Sony AIBO robots used as embodied multi-agent systems that play robotic soccer too.

    They are planning to enter the RoboCup American Open at CMU in Spring of 2003 and hoping to participate in RoboCup 2003 in Padua Italy.

    Suhit

  2. Another old idea... by devaldez · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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. The fact that this garnered a prestigious award and some press is made all the more disturbing because I've seen more than one software proof-of-concept for this idea in the past five years.

    My favorite was a Java-based applet called "Ants" where each entity only 3 rules...

    1. where home was
    2. what it "liked" (food)
    3. communicate food locations to peers when contact was made

    Within 20 seconds, the entire "colony" had been notified of the food location and the ants were swarming in a straight line between the colony location and the "food."

    I hate it when something that is neither novel nor compelling wins a prize like this...

    Hell, my father-in-law thought of this idea for a lawnmower grid, even...

    --
    "... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
  3. culture comentary by wornst · · Score: 5, Interesting

    " . . . making him, he says, the neighborhood geek in a black culture where adolescents rewarded only athletes and tough guys."

    I don't know how to respond from this observation in the article. On one hand being a "geek" in middle/high school really sucks. On the other hand, is it "black culture" that doesn't like geeks, or "white" culture that has traditionally railroaded blacks into those two categories? I definitely don't want to play the race card here. I just thought the observation in the article was interesting.

  4. not impressed by nailchipper · · Score: 2, Interesting

    i went to the the mit website when they showcase the robots, link

    i downloaded a few of the videos and was not that impressed. i am sure there is a lot of time and effort put into this, but i worked a summer camp where we taught kids a half of the things they were show casing... this company sells little robots and we can even buy little ifrared recievers imiters, light sensors, etc. we program it with BASIC to follow the light/dark, take commands from a remote control, pick things up. all this for just a 200bucks.

    now, many of the "crown control" things were odviously a bit more complicated. but is it THAT special? sending signals that push away or get closer to other bots.. not that new.

    one thing that i must say is that programming for these premanunfactured bots is easy, but if you ever try to linux-fy, and tweak, or play with the goodies inside, goodluck. Me and friend tried to make a linux compiler for it, and got no support from the company, no techdoc, nothing. (we were not surprised)

    --


    what is nailchipper?