Robot Roaches Become Leader Of The Pack
Writing by Conner Flynn on Tuesday, 20 of November , 2007 at 3:29 am
Jose Halloy and some colleagues at the Free University of Brussels have created some tiny robots that act like Pied Pipers and can trick roaches into following them. Even if it means gathering in a brightly lit area, which they hate. Their goal was to understand how roaches make decisions. Generally they act as a group, much like ants. Cockroaches tend to group together. Does that mean they have some kind of Emperor cockroach that leads them? How do they communicate? What kind of information do they pass?
The first thing the researchers did was create an enclosure with two shelters inside. Red-tinted plastic disks that the roaches could instinctively scurry underneath to avoid bright light. So, they dumped the creepy crawlies into the enclosure and the roaches did their normal thing, which is to run around chaotically for awhile before all settling under the same shelter. That wasn’t any huge revelation. Roaches like to gather in crowds. So just how do they manage that, with no leader, and no real intelligence or communication skills?
The roach wranglers figure that only 2 factors are important: Darkness and how many of their friends are there. At first they spastically scurry around between shelters, but at some point a majority is under one shelter and a consensus is reached, so they all follow suit. If that theory is correct, then the roaches can be tricked into doing unnatural things. So what do you do? You build a robot to infiltrate the colony of course.
As it turns out, roaches will “hang” with just about anything that is roughly their size and smell. They sprayed the little robots with some roach scent and programmed them to prefer crowds and darkness. So, they dropped the little robots in the shelter and the gathering behavior of the horde was pretty unaffected. I don’t think even a single roach could be heard to say, “Are you wearing a wire?”.
Next, the robots were programmed to prefer a less-dark hiding spot, which is a big roach no-no. The roaches and the bots were both put into the shelter together. The difference this time was that one of their hiding spots was brighter inside. They scurried around chaotically as usual and when the robots settled into the brighter shelter, the insects followed. It seems to prove that insects can in fact reach collective decisions by using just 2 basic rules.
This is a very cool experiment. We have known about this sort of thing for some now, so it isn’t Earth shattering. Just read the book Emergence: The connected Lives Of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnson In that book they talk about exactly this kind of bottom-up intelligence known as “Emergence”. For instance how ants do not really think or have a leader, but through chemicals can follow trails and make many sound and complex decisions regarding the colony. The science has been used in everything from city building to software development.
It is very cool to actually use robots to prove the point. And hey, if we can lead these filthy critters around, that means they can one day be led away from your crummy apartment right?
Category: Research
- Add this post to
- Del.icio.us -
- Digg
No comments yet.