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Colias robots SWARMING out of the lab
Cheap academic bot for research and mayhem
Video Greybeards of the IT industry will remember RoboCode, the Java programming teaching game that let you set virtual robots in battle with each other. How about teaching a bunch of real robots how to swarm?
That's the aim of the University of Lincoln's Colias project, which provides relatively low-cost – £25 a pop – micro-robot platform that can, among other things, replicate behaviours like the swarming of honeybees.
According to the University's announcement, the aim is to overcome the limitations of swarm modelling in simulations, which they say “is often inaccurate due to the poor modelling of external communications”.
Named after a species of butterfly, the individually-autonomus Colias robots are 4cm in diameter and can move at up to 35 cm/second. They sense each other, and communicate, using short-range infrared links to pass information around, and the researchers developed a low-bitrate messaging system that only needs 10 bits per message and 200 bits/second speed.
Farshad Arvin of the University of Lincoln, who worked with Chinese researchers at Tsinghua University, said the platform “allows for the coordination of simple physical robots in order to cooperatively perform tasks”.
“Our aim was to imitate the bio-inspired mechanisms of swarm robots and to enable all research groups, even with limited funding, to perform such research with real robots”, he added.
The work has been published in full at the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, here.
Last year, Harvard University showed off its swarming-robots project, another open platform, but one that other researchers have to build for themselves.
El Reg can't help but imagine what will happen when keen hackers equip Colias devices with weapons and lay out RoboCode arenas for real … ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
