TERMES, the termite inspired worker bot (via Harvard)
Harvard computer scientists and engineers from Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and its Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering recently announced the development of a new technology – robots that can design basic structures independently.
The four-year project, called TERMES, is a collective system of robots that can build structures without supervision or instruction by working together as a unit and analyzing the environment in real-time. The network of robots, which was inspired by the termite, was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2014 Annual Meeting and the project details were recently published in the February 14, 2014 issue of Science.
Radhika Nagpal, lead investigator of the study and Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS, said the team was inspired by the termites’ ability to build large structures without supervision by assessing an existing environment moment-to-moment and set out to design a technology that could duplicate this independent construction ability.
The TERMES robots can build complex structures, such as pyramids, using foam bricks. The bricks and robots were both designed by the engineering team at Harvard and were developed with the idea that the robors can be used to respond to national emergencies, such as floods.
The robots, like termites, base their construction skills on a style of inherent communication based on one’s surroundings, called stigmergy. The methodology allows for a team of TERMES robots, consisting of 10 to 10,000 bots, to work together on a single project, without the need for complex programming or supervision.
Each robot has building capabilities and the inherent ability to analyze the work the other robots have done and act accordingly. For example, if the robots are building a pyramid and the structure has just been completed, but a robot has already picked up a loose brick, it will analyze the progress of the pyramid, realize the brick its carrying is unnecessary and simply place it back in the pile of unused bricks. In a study, the robots successfully built the desired structures and reportedly adapted to unforeseen challenges.
While the robot colony is quite impressive in theory, in practice it leaves many questions unanswered. Lead author Justin Werfel of the Wyss Institute said he expects interesting, unpredictable behavior from the bots with larger-scale projects. Larger projects are also more difficult to control.
Nagpal said that although the system may not be viable on large scales in the real world, they’ve at least proven one extreme – that robots can independently operate and analyze basic information to build complex structures. Nagpal said, that alone, is a success.
C
See more news at:
