The Wall Street Journal look Swarm robotics, where no robot is in charge.The robots interact only with nearby robots and the swarm performs complex tasks through simple interactions.
“The researchers say this approach could excel when traditional robots fail, such as situations where central control is impractical or impossible due to distance, scale or communication barriers.”
For example, a swarm of drones could one day monitor vast areas for early-stage wildfires that current monitoring systems sometimes miss… A human operator could set parameters such as where to search, but the drones would independently share information such as which areas have been searched, adjust search patterns based on wind and other weather data from other drones in the swarm, and converge for more complete coverage of a particular area when smoke is detected. In another potential application, a swarm of robots could make deliveries over wide areas more efficient by alerting each other about changing traffic conditions or redistributing packages between them if one breaks down. Robot swarms could also manage farming operations in places without reliable internet service. And disaster response teams see potential for swarms in hurricane and tsunami zones where communications infrastructure has been destroyed.
On a microscopic scale, researchers are developing small robots that could work together to navigate the human body and deliver medications or remove blockages without surgery… In recent demonstrations, teams of small magnetic robots, each the size of a grain of sand, removed blockages in artificial blood vessels by forming chains to push through the blockages. The robots individually navigate through blood vessels to reach a blockage, guided by doctors or technicians who use magnetic fields to direct them, says researcher JJ Wie, a professor of organic and nano engineering at Hanyang University in South Korea. When they reach an obstruction, the robots coordinate with each other to team up and break through. Wie’s group is developing versions of these robots that biodegrade after use, eliminating the need for surgical removal, and coatings that make the robots compatible with human tissue. And while robots the size of grains of sand work for some applications, Wie says they will need to be scaled down to the nanoscale to cross biological barriers, such as cell membranes, or bind to specific molecular targets, such as surface proteins or receptors on cancer cells.
Some researchers are even exploring emergent intelligence: “when simple machines, following only a few local cues, begin to organize and act as if they share a mind…beyond the coordination designed by humans.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
