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Robots to swarm like ants


The new robots communicate with each other using infrared signals (Image: Jörg Seyfried)

Swarms of miniature robots that behave like colonies of ants could one day be deployed by the thousands to carry out tasks in the environment, or even in the human body, says a consortium of researchers.

The I-Swarm project, consisting of 10 research institutes, is coordinated by Professor Heinz Wörn and Jörg Seyfried of the Institute for Process Control and Robotics at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.

Ants not only gather food, build nests, move objects, clean, and feed the queen and larvae without directives from a leader, but they also have the ability to adjust their duties according to the environment or the colony's needs.

Teams of robots that work together to accomplish certain tasks is not a new idea.

But the I-Swarm project draws on computer chip manufacturing technology to mass produce millimetre-sized robots.

These could one day be deployed by the thousands to monitor and sense the environment, inspect pipelines, bridges, engines, or turbines, and perhaps even perform diagnostic measurements or medical procedures inside the human body.

"No one else has really built a thousand robots on a millimetre scale that can do something useful and interesting and [are] fully autonomous," says Associate Professor Lynne Parker of the University of Tennessee, a US expert in multi-robotic systems who is familiar with the I-Swarm project.

To date, Seyfried and the I-Swarm team have built two groups of centimetre-sized robots, named Jasmine and Micron, in order to test swarm communications.

In nature, the communication is mostly indirect, says Seyfried.

Ants, for example, may observe what other ants nearby are doing, they may follow a specific individual, or they may change the environment in a way that others can read, such as leaving behind a chemical trail.

The Jasmine and Micron robots use infrared signals, similar to that in a television's remote control device, to communicate.

When one robot detects an object, it signals to a nearby robot, which in turn signals to others, creating a communication chain event, that they've located an obstacle. They then begin to circle it.

Vibrations could help tiny robots move

Although these robots have wheels, Seyfried says that the final I-Swarm robots could be mass-produced in a way similar to flexible plastic computer chips.

They could move using tiny internal vibrations that work like a "kid in a cardboard box hopping around on the floor," says Seyfried.

Fast vibrations from behind would propel the computer chip-sized robot forward and could be adjusted to turn the device left or right.

Vibrations require very little power, which will be in short supply on the tiny robots. Even the computing capacity must be scaled down.

The robots must communicate, sense the environment (possibly with an infrared sensor or a tactile antenna), or even snap images using a 10 x 10 pixel camera, all with only 10 kilobytes of total memory.

The I-Swarm consortium hopes to demonstrate the first millimeter-sized robot by next year and by 2008 have several hundred devices working together like a colony of insects.

Tags: computers-and-technology, engineering