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The Swarmbots Are Coming

Posted by michael on from the make-room-make-room dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "For its latest issue, Wired Magazine asked several experts to tell us how the convergence between technology and biology was transforming their respective fields, from transportation to art, and even redefining life as we know it. In this special report, Living Machines, you'll discover that the nonliving world is very much alive. This summary is focused on one of the seven articles, which talks about ant algorithms and swarmbots. "Typically, a swarm bot is a collection of simple robots (s-bots) that self-organize according to algorithms inspired by the bridge-building and task-allocation activities of ants." And ant algorithms are used today to solve human problems especially in distribution and logistics."

4 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. A good intro to AI... by tcopeland · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...including ant algorithms, simulated annealing, and fuzzy logic is M. Tim Jones' AI Application Programming.

    The examples are especially helpful; they're written in nice portable C. I've been working on a little project to translate them to Ruby; porting notes and Gnuplot charts and such are here and the code for the Ant Algorithm translation is here.

    --
    The Army reading list
  2. Ant reference by IchBinDasWalross · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mute Filesharing is one of the projects talking about ant technology, with a pretty thorough description of how they use AntTech.

    --
    Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
  3. Smart Dust by pararox · · Score: 5, Informative

    This reminds me of an article in the new "Innovators Section" as seen in Time magazine (January 12th '04 edition).

    Essentially, it discusses Kris Pister who developed Smart Dust - a wireless network of sensors, called motes. Each mote has a chip about the size of a grain of rice that detects and records things like termperature and motion at its location. The motes have minisule radio transmitters that talk to otehr motes. With a single network of 10,000 motes, the upper limit, you could cover some 9 sq. miles - and get information about each point along the way!

    Anyway, here's a brief description:
    innovationwatch.com

    Here is the Dust, Inc. homepage:
    http://www.dust-inc.com/

    Frightening technology in many respects, but I can't help but smile at the thought of the brilliance behind it all.

    Regards,
    -pararox-

  4. Hi from an of the Swarmbot developper by nctysagoon.com · · Score: 3, Informative
    Hi,

    I'm one of the Swarmbot developper. I have been in charge of porting Linux to the motherboard of thwe s-bot as well as writing its system software. Let's have some interesting data about the s-bot :
    • 9 degrees of freedom (2 wheels, turret rotation, elevation of gripper (can lift another s-bot), gripper (have 1.5 kg of pressure), mobile arm (3 dof), mobile gripper)
    • 19 IR sensors (15 around, 4 bottom)
    • 2D camera
    • 4 microphones, 2 loudspeakers
    • light ring (8 RGB) and light sensors (8)
    • torque and speed sensors on major dof
    • accelerometer and structural deformation sensors
    • 2 temperature and humidity sensors
    • 13 PIC uC for local computation
    • One homemade 400 MHz X-Scale CPU board
    • Wifi
    • 700 g, 2 hours autonomy


    Direct links :
    http://www.swarm-bots.org
    http://lsa1pc65.epfl.ch/research/projects/SwarmBot s/index.php

    Have a nice day,

    Steph