Month: September 2022

SIMPLE RULES AND SHIT HAPPENS. "Scientists have long been able to simulate huge swarms of life-like virtual particles in computers, using very simple rules. But the real world is full of pesky physics, inconvenient noise, and temperamental circuitry. Stuff goes wrong." https://lnkd.in/dBAx4nW View in LinkedIn

MULTI-ROBOT COOPERATION PLUSSES. "Tasks are basically too complex for a single robot to achieve because single robot is spatially limited; Using multiple simple robots may be cheaper and simpler than handling one complex robot; Multi-robot systems are more flexible and fault-tolerant than single robots acting alone." https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn

INTUITIVE SWARM INTELLIGENCE. “Like fire ants, when they get to a body of water, they wouldn’t have to be fed the image of a bridge; they would just self-assemble into one. “That’s a whole other level of intelligence, and it’s not really understood how to do that in robotics...But nature does it well".” http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/08/14/a-swarm-of-a-thousand-cooperative-self-organising-robots/ View in LinkedIn

HOSTILE ENVIRONMENTS. "One of the greatest challenges in robotics is to create machines that are able to interact with unpredictable environments in real time. A possible solution may be to use swarms of robots behaving in a self-organized manner, similar to workers in an ant colony." https://lnkd.in/dEdzdnt View in LinkedIn

KEYS TO ANT SUCCESS. "Efficient mechanisms of division of labour, in particular series–parallel operation and transfer of information among group members, are key components of the tremendous ecological success of ants." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6799/full/406992a0.html View in LinkedIn

SWARM SIZE AND EFFICIENCY. "Groups of robots using ant-inspired algorithms of decentralized control techniques foraged more efficiently and maintained higher levels of group energy than single robots. But the benefits of group living decreased in larger groups, most probably because of interference during foraging. Intriguingly, a similar relationship between group size and efficiency has been documented in social insects." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6799/full/406992a0.html View in LinkedIn

SIMILAR RULES? "When food items were clustered, groups where robots could recruit other robots in an ant-like manner were more efficient than groups without information transfer, suggesting that group dynamics of swarms of robots may follow rules similar to those governing social insects." http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6799/full/406992a0.html View in LinkedIn

SWARM ROBOTICS. "The main characteristics of a swarm robotics are summarized: simplicity of robots, fully distributed system, scalability, robustness." They also include parallelism, robustness, scalability, heterogeneity, flexibility, complex tasks, and cost effectiveness. https://lnkd.in/dTg7N-6 View in LinkedIn

GENETIC PROGRAMMING of virtual ant bots over 2,000 generations starts to closely mimic the efficiency of leaf-cutter ants. "The robots used in this study could exhibit only very simple behaviors: They could move to and from a light source placed above the blocks, move about randomly, or pick up or drop an object. Within this framework, each robot could be programmed to mimic the roles of the leafcutters." https://lnkd.in/dy24Vex View in LinkedIn

BOT EVOLUTION. "After 500 generations researchers saw the generalist strategy begin to emerge: navigate toward light, pick up block, navigate away from light, drop block, repeat. After a thousand generations task partitioning begins to emerge and the cooperative behavior is optimized and refined over an additional thousand generations." http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/antlike-robots-might-help-explain-origins-cooperation View in LinkedIn