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Robot Swarms Work Together to Move Objects |
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Written by William Cox
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Monday, 20 November 2006 |
A group of swarm robots, developed by Marco Dorigo , and other from Free University of Brussels , Belgium, Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy, Autonomous Systems Laboratory , Switzerland, and Dalle Molle Institute for the Study of Artificial Intelligence , Switzerland, use simple rules to collaborate and work together. The robots can only see what's around them and cannot directly communicate to each other.
In experiments, six of the cylindrical robots were able to drag an object across the floor of a room. Working autonomously, they locate and assemble around the object and either grab hold of it directly or of another robot nearby, before slowly dragging it towards a target.
In this video, you can see how the robots locate the red object and try to latch onto it. Once they've grabbed it, they turn themselves red, thereby becoming part of the object. Once each robot can no longer see any red, they begin to move the object towards the light.
Each robot is just over 7" tall and comes with a gripper, and tracked wheels. They can also sense external forces acting on them, in order to determine which way the swarm is pulling on the object. The rules that the robots followed were developed specifically for the task they had at hand, but Dorigo is looking to develop a second generation of robots that will be able to interact in a human environments.
"It is called Swarmanoid and will have three different kinds of robots," he explains. Some robots will be able to crawl along like Swarm-bots, others will be able to climb walls, and others still will be able to fly, he says.
The potential for this kind of research is almost limitless. We look forward to hearing more about Dorigo's work in the future.
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