Month: September 2022

THE KILOBOTS "were inspired by natural swarms, where simple and limited units can cooperate to do great things. Thousands of fire ants can unite into living bridges, rafts and buildings. Billions of unthinking neurons can create the human brain. Trillions of cells can fashion a tree or a tyrannosaur." Remarkable video. https://lnkd.in/d8fvb_E View in LinkedIn

RECORD BREAKING. "Scientists have tried to make artificial swarms with similar abilities, but building and programming them is expensive and difficult. Most of these robot herds consist of a few dozen units, and only a few include more than a hundred. The Kilobots smash that record." https://lnkd.in/d8fvb_E View in LinkedIn

LARGEST BIT SWARMS. "A Swarm of a Thousand Cooperative, Self-Organising Robots. In a lab at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, the world’s largest swarm of cooperative robots is building a star...out of themselves. There are 1024 of these inch-wide ‘Kilobots’, and they can arrange themselves into different shapes, from a letter to a wrench.” https://lnkd.in/d8fvb_E View in LinkedIn

KILOBOTS. "They are slow and comically jerky in their movements, but they are also autonomous. Once they’re given a shape, they can recreate it without any further instructions, simply by cooperating with their neighbours and organising themselves." https://lnkd.in/d8fvb_E View in LinkedIn

FUTURE EMERGING. "This is a staggering work,” adds Iain Couzin, who studies collective animal behaviour at Princeton University. “It offers a vision of the future where robot groups could form structures on demand as, for example, in search-and-rescue in dangerous environments, or even the formation of miniature swarms within the body to detect and treat disease.” https://lnkd.in/d8fvb_E View in LinkedIn

UNDIRECTED. "Every Kilobot runs on the same program. The team only has to give them a shape and nominate four of them as seeds. Once that’s done, the rest slowly pour into the right pattern, in an endearingly life-like way. It takes them around 12 hours, but they do it all without any human intervention." https://lnkd.in/d8fvb_E View in LinkedIn

MIXED SWARMS. Heterogeneous multi-agent mixed swarms of bots, humans and dogs "working in cooperation to solve distributed tasks that require a wide diversity of sensory-motor and cognitive skills." Each component has a high level of autonomy but cooperate synergistically. http://www.swarmix.org/ View in LinkedIn

"FLYNET (Micro and Nano Aerial Vehicle Networks for Civilian Use) aims at discovering novel methods to turn micro and nano aerial vehicle (MAV and NAV) systems for civilian use into a reality by targeting the unsolved original topic of multi-hop aerial networking in fleets." https://lnkd.in/eJVn6x4 View in LinkedIn

SWARMANOID PROJECT. A grippingly chilling and exciting video of cooperative bots seeking and retrieving an object. A must-watch video. Stunning. https://lnkd.in/dcd3APB View in LinkedIn

COORDINATION OF ROBOTS. Another very compelling video. https://lnkd.in/eqc4xPm View in LinkedIn