Juanma Oyarzábal and Álvaro Amor are two students of Computer Engineering at the University of Deusto in Bilbao (that’s in Spain). For their final year project, they created this small swarm of construction robots who cooperate to build a structure (mostly) autonomously. The long-term concept is that robots will be able take over many of the repeatable heavy lifting tasks on a construction site with minimal human supervision.

Thanks to this new way of looking at construction, costs and construction time can be reduced considerably, and it exempts the workers of the most arduous tasks so that they can focus on more rewarding tasks such as finishing facilities and monitoring that everything runs properly.

While this is the first swarm of constructobots I’ve seen, getting robots to build structures by themselves is something we’ve seen a few times before around here… There was that robot bricklayer that’s able to lay bricks so precisely that they create pictures out of reflected sunlight, and the robot that can “print” an entire custom house out of concrete in a single day.

Incidentally, I love how the video looks like it was shot in a dorm room, and evidently they only had access to one color sensor that had to be shared between four robots. Mad props on the suit (gold cufflinks!) and fancy shoes… Way to keep it classy guys.

Thanks Juanma and Álvaro!

In March of last year, we posted about a project to mount WiFi and cellular routers on quadrotor UAVs to enable rapid deployment of networks in disaster areas. EPFL has been working on the same sort of thing, except utilizing swarms of micro air vehicles (MAVs) relying on intelligence algorithms derived from the behavior of army ants. Basically, it’s like LANDroids, except airborne.

SMAVNET (Swarming Micro Air Vehicle Network) consists of a whole bunch of small, cheap (or relatively cheap, more on that in a follow-up post) micro air vehicles. Each one carries an off-the-shelf USB wireless dongle, and by following simple rules to optimize their positions and scout new territory, the drones can spread out, locate a target, establish a robust aerial data network, and then make their way back to base for an automated landing when they’re finished. Sweet concept, right? Well, here’s the system in action using real MAVs:

As far as I know, these 10 MAVs constitute the largest outdoor aerial robotic swarm ever deployed. SMAVNET is primarily designed to facilitate communications in disaster areas. However, it’s hard to ignore the potential military applications, especially considering how similar SMAVNET is to the LANDroid project, which is sponsored by DARPA. There are obviously substantial upsides and downsides to flying network nodes versus ground network nodes, but it strikes me that a combination of the two would be ideal: SMAVNET provides fast response time, while LANDroids offer longer term endurance. That’s just a fantasy, of course, but it’s pretty cool to watch how swarm robotics has been evolving over the last few years, especially now that we’re starting to see real life practical applications for the technology.

[ SMAVNET ]

Thanks Sabine!

Colony Scout is a modular robot platform designed to provide adaptable and affordable swarm robotics to anyone who wants it. “Modular” and “adaptable” means that each individual robot comes with an accessory plate to which you can bolt pretty much anything you want, including a little forklift that extends up to 6 inches, or a digger arm and bucket with a 2 pound capacity:

Besides the accessories, Colony Scout is designed to be cheap and simple. The batteries and processor are easy to access, and the basic robot includes long range sonar and short range IR sensors to allow for obstacle avoidance. Also, the two halves of the chassis are coupled with a rotating joint, allowing the robot to navigate some pretty serious bumps, even at its 2 mph top speed:

The target price for for the Colony Scout is a reasonably affordable $500… In bulk, that is, but with swarm robotics, there’s really no other way to go.

[ Colony Scout ] VIA [ I Heart Robotics ]

I love Microsoft Surface. I’ve been in love with it ever since the hands-on demo I got back at CES 2008. Since then, Surface has trickled into a few retail settings (and become the most epic D&D tabletop evar), but it shines when it comes to practical applications, too. Mark Micire at UMass Lowell has taken a Surface table and set it up to control a small swarm of (as yet hypothetical) robots through one of the most simple and effective interfaces I’ve ever seen, a hallmark of Surface. Not only can you just tap, touch, and drag to command as many robots as you like, but if you need to take personal control, the interface for that is extremely slick, Minority Report style. Furthermore, the control interface is also the display, making it fast and intuitive to change commands based on new data. Although it’s not implemented here, a logical next step might be to update the Surface display based on real-time mapping data from the robot swarm.

Another advantage of this kind of system is that you can combine multiple types of robots returning all kinds of data into one seamless command and control display. Like, imagine that some of the swarm consisted of UAVs, and you could add a Z coordinate and send them off to scout ahead. And maybe they have radar or LIDAR, and then that data gets overlaid on the display as well. Sort of like this, except real. Am I gushing? I think I’m gushing. But this is totally cool, and there’s tons of potential. It’s not even that there’s anything that innovative going on here, strictly… It’s just that Surface is able to merge existing hardware and existing controls into a new interface, which makes all the difference.

While I wouldn’t say that interface is necessarily overlooked when it comes to the current generation of robot designs, I do think it’s under-emphasized. People tend to focus on making a totally awesome robot, but unless it’s entirely autonomous, the effectiveness with which the robot operates is dependent on (and in some cases constrained by) the ability of the human user to communicate what they want to the robot quickly and precisely. And even if it IS entirely autonomous, some directions are generally required. I won’t belabor the many examples of this, but I would suggest that a mediocre robot with a good control system is substantially more effective than a good robot with a mediocre control system.

[ UMass Lowell Robotics Lab ] VIA [ Microsoft Robotics Blog ]

Getting oil out of water isn’t that hard, on principle. What is hard is getting a huge amount of oil out of an even huger amount of water. If you think about it, this is really a perfect task for a swarm of robots, since it’s simple and repeatable and just needs to be done over and over (and over and over and over) again. With this in mind, MIT’s Senseable City Lab has created Seaswarm, a swarm of networked oil spill cleanup robots:

Seaswarm is designed to be simple, cheap, and efficient. To collect oil, the robots use a wide belt covered in a special hydrophobic nanofabric (about the consistency of a paper towel) that sucks 20 times its own weight in oil (and other pollutants) out of water. The belt moves around like a treadmill, which passes the befouled nanofabric back to be cleaned while simultaneously propelling the robot forward. The video talks about heat being used to separate oil from the nanofiber, while the description on the Seaswarm website makes it seems like the oil is squeezed out using rollers… Whatever floats your robot, I guess.

What I’m not too sure about is where all of that captured oil goes. Using their solar panels for power the bots can collect for several weeks at a time, and the more oil they collect, the heavier they’ll get, and the more energy it’ll take to keep them moving. The website does mention that the oil will be ‘digested,’ which I assume implies microbes, but they’ll either have to collect oil very slowly or have some wicked crazy hungry bugs to be able to get around the problem.

Seaswarm is designed from the water up to utilize swarm behaviors. To combat a spill the size of the recent one in the gulf, about 5000 fully autonomous Seaswarm units would cooperate for a month, using GPS and WiFi to organize themselves for most efficient coverage. And of course, you get all the usual swarm benefits of scalability, adaptability, and robustness.

While Seaswarm as a whole is currently just a concept, they have built an actual working prototype (in the pic above), which was just tested out on the Charles river in Boston, I guess because the designers figured they’d teach the robot some humility when it comes to pollution clean-up.

[ Seaswarm ]

We first wrote about Handbot a year ago, when we saw it climb up a bookshelf and steal a book. Handbot relies on a spring-launched magnetic grappling hook to lift itself up off the floor to get its grippers on things up the Z axis… I especially like the cute little propellers which I’m pretty sure the bot uses to maintain its rotational orientation as it rises. Of course, without a detachable grappling hook, Handbot is good for use exactly once, which (obviously) isn’t ideal. Now, however, it’s got a switchoffable magnet, meaning that it can steal two different books. Run for the hills!

The reason that it’s called Handbot is that it’s designed to be the manipulation portion of a robot made up of individual specialized sub-robots, including Eyebots for sensing and Footbots for ground movement. The whole shebang forms “an heterogeneous robotic system” called Swarmanoid, and eventually, one Swarmanoid assemblage will be comprised of some 60 (!) individual Handbots, Eyebots, and Footbots, capable of cooperatively moving around, sensing, and manipulating in 3D space.

As long as the ceiling is magnet friendly, anyway.

[ Swarmanoid ]

We’ve posted a lot around here about how swarm robotics is potentially really, really awesome, but besides kidnapping children we haven’t seen that many relevant examples of practical swarm robotics. The above video, from the GRASP Lab at UPenn, shows a group of autonomous quadrotors (these bad boys) teaming up to lift heavy and off-balance loads.

Each quadrotor weighs 500 grams and can deliver some 1250 grams of thrust, making their individual payload capacity somewhere around half a kilogram. This means that a couple together could lift a kilogram, and you can do the math on from there, but there are lots of reasons why you might want a bunch of extra robots cooperating on the lift, which gets back to why swarm robotics has so much potential in the first place. For example, having extra bots protects against mechanical failure of an individual bot. It also protects against complications like wind. Or maybe whatever you’re lifting has a long distance to go or needs to be in the air for a while, and the bots can switch off to go recharge themselves.

It’s interesting to compare these cooperative quadrotors with that distributed flight array from ETH Zurich that we wrote about last month. It’s a different approach, certainly, but the premise is similar, and it’ll be lots of fun to see how each of these projects evolves.

[ GRASP ]

Batteries are terribly inconvenient. The more power or endurance you need, the bulkier and heavier the battery has to be, and the more time it takes to recharge. Really, it’s the recharging that’s the problem, since until we develop a feasible ultracapacitor, any battery powered robot is going to have to spend a significant amount of time doing nothing but sitting around recharging its batteries.

One way to get around this is to charge backup batteries external to the robot itself, but that process has generally been more trouble than it’s worth, since batteries tend to be heavily integrated into the structures of robots. Way back in September of 2009, we posted about a conceptual pet care robot that used an external battery swapping method, which was very cool, but it didn’t look like it had a prayer of ever being realized. The video above shows an actual external battery swapping system in action, on a marXbot, which is part of the Swarmanoid project from EPFL. Using a rotary loader, marXbot can swap out its battery in seconds while a capacitor keeps the robot powered. The batteries charge on the loader, so by the time the spent battery makes it all the way around, it’s been recharged and is ready for another robot in need of a fresh meal.

Somewhat ironically, swarms of robots are arguably least dependent on power system restraints, the idea being that you can just have other robots in the swarm cycle in and out to charge. However, the more robots you have, the more charging infrastructure you need. With this battery swapping system, the number of robots that can recharge at once is limited only by the number of batteries in the system, as opposed to the number of charging stations or outlets or something, which is much more efficient.

[ marXbot ]

We posted last week about MIT’s FlyFire project, which takes swarms of little flying robots and uses them to create dynamic 3D images. Last September, Julia Tsao put together a conceptual project for her graduate thesis that embodies a similar set of ideas… Using swarms of small robots working together to form displays. She took the concept to a few different places, though, by enabling the robots to interact with other objects both directly and indirectly. ‘Course, it’s easy to get robots to do whatever you want in a concept video, but there are some interesting ideas here. My third favorite part of the project is the conceptual remote control:

My second favorite part is the conceptual kill switch:

And my favorite part of all are the warning labels:

I can’t quite make out that last one… Something about diving into a swimming pool if the bots are trying to murder you? Sounds like it might actually work, good plan!

[ Curious Displays ] VIA [ Boing Boing ] VIA [ Robot Living ]

The nice thing about robots in space is that there’s no gravity, so you don’t have to worry about things like weight and balance. The annoying thing about robots is space is that there’s no gravity, so orientation and control is a problem. MIT has had a set of robots called SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient Experimental Satellites) on board the International Space Station since May of 2006 to test out algorithms for autonomous navigation and docking maneuvers. Each sphere is about 8″ in diameter and has 18 sides. They gets around with 12 thrusters powered by compressed CO2, while ultrasonic and infrared sensors and a wireless link tell them where they are. SPHERES are able to maneuver precisely enough to dance around in a circle on the ISS; watch as a third robot enters the pattern:

The idea behind SPHERES is that a bunch of small satellites working together is much cheaper, much more efficient, and much more robust than one single large satellite. It’s swarm robotics, up in space.

[ NASA ] and [ MIT Spheres ] VIA [ Danger Room ]