McLurkin, 32, a graduate student in computer science at M.I.T., the young scientist is on the forefront of developing "swarmbots"—packs of dozens of small robots that communicate with one another and work in harmony to complete an assignment. They have no centralized command system and can cover vast terrain; if one is destroyed, others fill in.
McLurkin's machines were inspired by nature. As an undergraduate at M.I.T., he became interested in ants and kept a terrarium full of them on his desk. The decentralized nature of ant colonies gave him a model for his robots. "I worked on the notion of using virtual pheromones [the biochemical scents that some animals use to communicate]," he says. "As one robot gathers knowledge, it spreads it to its neighbors, and they spread it to their neighbors."
Monday, February 21, 2005
Where is the intellligence?
Lewis Thomas, in Lives of a Cell, observes a colony of mindless ants that behave quite intelligently. Here, McLurkin is getting robots to behave like an any colony: when you have enough, they start working.
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3 comments:
Emergence, by any other name, is still the fruit of a complex system.
interesting..."emergence"... off to read up on that link. Nice post! (wikipedia article)
On the other hand, Wolfram (A New Science) demonstrates something like "emergence" coming from very very simple systems which iterate many many many times... ie, a simple system, iterated, is complex. To go from here to there, iterate: there is no short cut.
Hi Blogger
I was thinking of using nexus pheromones. Does it work?
Thanks
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