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SwarmOS Demonstrated at Idea Festival
PacoCheezdom writes "Intelligent Life has short summary of a demonstration by MIT professor James McLurkin of his new group-minded robots, which run an operating system called 'Swarm OS'. The robots are able to work together as a group not by communicating with all members of the group at once, but by talking only to their neighbors, and model other similar behaviors performed by bees and ants. "
I didn't think it was a great book, but a lot of people seem to like the book "Prey" by Michael Crichton. It has a few lists of sample applications of swarms when used with nanobots, but military and medical applications were the focus...
You can read more about this research and see some videos of the robots in action here.
I saw Mr. McLurkin give his presentation here in Ottawa. Fascinating stuff. Each component of the swarm is very dumb, with very little storage. If you want to store a location for future reference, it's very easy; park a robot there.
All the robots have a sound system, though; the first thing Mr. McLurkin did during his presentation was to have a single robot request that 6 other robots follow it, and the swarm picked and allocated 6 robots, and they all went off in a chain, singing "Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work we go".
Check out James McLurkin's website for some presentations and videos:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/jamesm/
...of an obligatorily /.-ted article here.
Here is the Google cache if anyone is interested.
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Some are complaining that they can't get to the server, so here is the text:
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Special to INTELLIGENT DAILY LIFE
Surrounded by buzzing robots that end the session by performing in an orchestra, James McLurkin, a PhD student at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, talks about distributed robotics and swarm behavior to a packed house. His work has its roots in "swarm intelligence"--the study of collective behavior in decentralised, self-organised systems. Think of ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, fish schooling, and many other examples in nature.
During the last few hundred million years, nature has perfected such interactions. Now, scientists such as McLurkin want to get a better understanding of how these biological processes work and apply this knowledge to programming robots for doing complex tasks in groups. Perhaps, this is the ultimate interpretation of the Wisdom of Crowds thesis: individuals don't have to be smart to produce very smart group outcomes. Did somebody mention Wikipedia?
Early on, McLurkin pulls up a slide of Isaac Asimov's famed three laws of robotics, intended to forestall a robot revolt against humanity. "Well, robots don't know how to read, so those laws are not particularly useful", he smiles. Robots are not even smart enough to travel from the stage to the audience: they would get trapped in wires or collapse to the floor. For all the talk about robotics, today an average squirrel can still do more than any robot, he says.
He points to a number of philosophical, not just engineering problems, in his field. Problem number one is that we don't know what intelligence is, nor how to define it. Should we subject the robots to some upgraded version of the Turing test (which says that if a judge can't tell whether he is talking to a machine or a person, the machine passes the intelligence test)?
Can intelligence emerge from interactions of unintelligent components? That is a second philosophical question. As we are all built from molecules, continues McLurkin, either intelligence is something that results from interactions, or molecules are intelligent.
The third and final question is whether an intellect needs a body. Can a brain in a vat understand and experience the world without anything to relate to? Can we build such an intellect?
That slide with the three philosophical questions is subtitled "things that make you go "hmmm", and one can hear half of the audience "hmming".
Having finished with the philosophy, McLurkin gives a brief overview of earlier efforts to mass-build robots, presenting quite a few models, from iRobot Roomba to Honda Asimo to iRobot Packbot, all of them having different looks and different functionality. And, of course, NASA's successful launch of two robots on to Mars.
Quite naturally, he makes a transition to his own work. He has 112 robots in his arsenal and he is trying hard to make them work together. In his view, robots are best at jobs that are dangerous, dirty, or dull: "What if we sent 20 robots to work in hot spots around the world? What if we sent 200 robots to look for surivors after an earthquake? What if sent 2,000 robots to explore Mars?".
It's this last question he wants to address with his on-stage demonstration. McLurkin turns to a few dozen robots that he has on stage (he controls them with a remote). As a starter, he asks the robots to form a line; surely enough, they do. Next, he orders the robots to spread out. They do this too. The demonstration proceeds quite smoothly.
One thing that the robots don't know yet is how to define boundaries of the network, so they often spread out from the center and then get disconnected. The robots can communicate via one another (they know the neighbors, but don't know about everybody else) but
In his second dispatch from the Idea Festival in Louisville, Evgeny Morozov watches a podium-full of robots buzz around like bees, ask each other questions, find an orange, leave the room, form an orchestra, and prepare one day to save your life
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I would also suggest "The Invincible" by Stanislaw Lem. The book was written in the sixties.
Too late! DARPA already has a project for a "self-healing" minefield based on a very similar approach.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
There is also immense military interest. Research doesn't get done on a large scale without funding. Funding, generally speaking - at least in engineering, doesn't come without someone with some influence being convinced that there will be applications.
m0nstr42.blogspot.com
No, it isn't.
Swarm intelligence relies on emergence that arises from many simple agents that interact locally with each other (i.e. without a master controller), using minimal rules. These are the keypoints of this field: there isn't a single point of failure, you can ensure degradation of service gracefully, you can even perform self-repair, etc. It allows to solve large problems without having to implement a complex monolithic system.
Naturally, the difficulties then lie in defining the right rules for the swarm of agents to generate the expected macroscopic group behaviour.
I know of at least one shipping company (in Switzerland IIRC) that uses swarm intelligence techniques to give a good solution to the TSP in reasonable time, and uses that to schedule the plan for its trucks daily. More applications are being developed, including small robots to inspect parts in inaccessible locations (e.g. airplane), etc.
theefer