Slashdot Mirror
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, for one, welcome the new swarming overlords nearest to me, so that they might welcome the rest.
@AlexSheive
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/
Boids was a program written to try to simulate the flocking behavior of birds. It was written by Craig Reynolds
Reynolds gave his boids 3 rules:
1 Don't crowd too close to other boids
2 Try to go the same direction as other boids near you
3 Try to be in the average position of your local neighbors.
With just those three simple rules, the boids arranged themselves in a flock. Much to Reynolds surprise, without any more rules than that, the flock exhibited other emergent behavior, such as a flock that split up to go around an obstacle would rejoin.
More at: http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/
Cars driving themselves.