Invited talk by Marco Dorigo.
Swarm intelligence: IA technique based on emergence of grupal behaviors from a decentralized, individual intelligences. Examples from biological societies: ants searching paths, transporting things and assembling things to build a bridge. And they’re many other examples about foraging or division of labor.
Swarm robotics motivation: fault tolerant system, high parallelism degree, scalability and low cost. A swarm-bot is a robotic system composed by a set of robots that can touch each other and create more complex structures. Explainig hardware stuff now. And some videos seeing them at work.
Basic behaviour can be hand-coded or it can be evolved from simple neural networks and it can be loaded in areal s-bot. Capacities:
- coordinate motion: detect the movement of the rest and determines its behavior. Combined with self-assembly allow the robots to create special structures to avoid obstacles
- selft assembly
- cooperative transport: move things bigger than the robots. Again, can be combined with self assembly. OMFG!! They’re moving a child!!!
- goal search and path formation: limited sensing acapabilities, so they moves randomly until they sense the goal they begin to form a chain. Some kind of bread crumbs :-)
Ongoing work: functional self-assembly, morphology formation and swarm-level fault detection. Fantastic