James McLurkin’s RoboSwarm

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 15 of April , 2008 at 2:15 am

I’m a big fan of swarm robotics. Swarms have a lot of distinct advantages over single robots that are bigger and more complex, including cheapness, simplicity, expandability, and redundancy. Just because the robots in a swarm are small doesn’t necessarily mean that the swarm itself can’t exhibit complex behavior or carry out complicated tasks, as we’ve seen. But one of the biggest hurdles to overcome in swarm robotics is figuring out how to program them all to do what you want them to do without spending a few years doing it. MIT’s James McLurkin has been working on this very thing, with what appears to be no small amount of success:

The bots in use for this project are members of the iRobot Swarm, which was a DARPA sponsored project to develop scalable algorithms for controlling large numbers (10-10,000) of robots. There are 100 robots in this particular swarm, and each one operates on a “glass box” principle, which means that the hardware and software are designed to run in a look but don’t touch mode. There’s a simple reason for this: every action you’d have to perform on one robot (say, turning it on) would then have to be duplicated on every other robot in the swarm. That’s a nuisance for 10 robots, a huge pain in the ass for 100 robots, and impossible for 10,000 robots. The robots are therefore able to charge themselves, turn themselves on and off, and upload and download data. The researchers don’t have to do anything besides upload programs, run them, and watch the results unfold. That’s the idea, anyway.

More after the jump.

One of the key principles behind swarms is the ability to communicate information. If you think about a swarm of animals like bees or ants, you find an extraordinarily complex information distribution system that has emerged from relatively simple principles. Here’s how it works with McLurkin’s swarm:

The robots communicate using very, very simple things. Each robot typically says maybe 80 bytes of information to another robot, four times a second. Eighty characters is about one line of text on a printed page. They say things like, “I’m on the edge of explored space. I need more robots to help me explore this new room over here.” They say things like, “I am one communication hop away from the chargers.” If you want to find the chargers and you are five hops away, you can move toward a four-hop robot and then move toward a three-hop robot and a two-hop robot, etc. etc. Eventually you will get close to the robots that are right next to the chargers. Then you can see the chargers and go right in. They say things like, “I’m robot number five of seven. I’m recruiting you to be robot six of seven. And it’s your job to recruit robot seven of seven.” If you’re doing, for example, follow the leader, you can share information as to who needs to recruit whom.

So, with all of these identical robots running around, do they lose personality? Perhaps, but the swarm itself becomes a singlar entity, according to McLurkin:

“On an emotional level, individual robots are more appealing because you can look at one, maybe it’s robot #73, and watch that robot run around and wonder, “Hunh? What is that robot doing?” You can identify it and personify it and get into it. But the whole magic is at the swarm level. It does take some practice. You’ve got to learn how to twist your neck in the right direction to get a feel for what the whole swarm is doing and what you told the whole swarm to do. There definitely is Zen in there.”

You can read NOVA ScienceNow’s entire interview with McLurkin here.

[ James McLurkin's MIT Webpage ] VIA [ Robot Living ]

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Category: Research

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