
Thousand-robot swarm self-assembles into arbitrary shapes - hallieatrobohub
http://robohub.org/thousand-robot-swarm-self-assembles-into-arbitrary-shapes/
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harpastum
That locomotion system is really interesting. Using three rigid legs and
vibrating them individually to achieve directed motion. Does anyone have any
more information on how that works?

 _Update:_ I found a paper that describes something similar. It is vastly
improved by a vibrating table — Does anyone with access to _Science_ know if
Harvard used one? [http://wiki.polymtl.ca/nano/images/a/ae/C-2007-NW-AIM-
ANguye...](http://wiki.polymtl.ca/nano/images/a/ae/C-2007-NW-AIM-ANguyen.pdf)

~~~
beambot
I wrote about these (actually, a lot of the prior art) on Hizook:
[http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/09/08/infrared-remote-
contro...](http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/09/08/infrared-remote-controlled-
rc-steerable-vibrobot-created-naghi-sotoudeh)

They're little more than a vibrobot (ie. a hexbug nano) with dual vibrating
motors that preferentially steer and move. It's easy and elegant. They make
for a great teaching toy!

~~~
girvo
Oh so it's like a BEAM bot? Only this seems decidedly not analog, as per what
I remember BEAM was supposed to be. That reminds me to go get a soldering
iron, I've always wanted to build a solar roller.

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GrantS
This work comes out of Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired
Engineering, which was not on my radar before today. Apparently just last week
they released some even more impressive work (in the sense that I would not
have thought it possible) on a self-folding mobile robot:
[http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/162/robot-folds-
its...](http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/162/robot-folds-itself-up-
and-walks-away)

The video of the robot self-folding (and walking away!) at about 1 minute in
blew me away, highly recommended to anyone who missed this story last week.

~~~
craigching
If you want to keep up with robotics maybe a bit better, I believe the folding
robot was spammed to /r/robotics last week or the week before. I'm not trying
to be critical or anything, just letting you know that that link was quite
popular on a popular robotics forum ;)

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trose
Next step would be to optimize the placement algorithm I think. The 'K'
example is the post obvious. You could have robots start creating the lower
right quadrant and correct their position as the rest of the group gathers.

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netcan
There is something very powerful when something about a robot's behavior looks
animal, at least from the perspective of an animal. It feels like proof we're
going in the right direction.

Another really good example is a video of one of those boston dynamics
animalbots losing its balance on ice and then regaining its footing. It's hard
not to anthropomorphize and ascribe an emotion. Even worse when it's
deliberately kicked off balance by a human. Bad person! Poor robot.

These things move like organic life.

~~~
AYBABTME
I'm speaking through my hat, but I believe many of those behaviors are
inspired from the animal kingdom, which could explain why the result looks
animal.

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ChuckMcM
That is pretty cool, sort of combines two fun disciplines, robots and cellular
automatons. So the art installation here is swarm robots that use pre-
programmed neighbor visibility setups but I'm going to have to think longer
about ways you could do this with minimal localization information.

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Sniffnoy
I notice the video says "The algorithm for self-assembly allows for the
provably correct formation of any simply-connected shape". I wonder what goes
wrong if it's not simply-connected. Or is it just that they can't prove that
it works in this case?

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trhway
>Charging was initiated by sandwiching all the robots between two conductive
surfaces.

sideways - i see a completely automatic Prius(Volt/etc.) plugin just parking
between 2 flexible plates sticking from the parking wall.

Anyway, feels like Episode 1 is upon us.

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YetAnotherBozo
"Each robot has simple capabilities, and is susceptible to many errors. To
compensate for this, they must work together."

Just like people.

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rasur
That's really pretty impressive work. Will be interesting to see the fruits of
their labours at smaller (and larger) scales.

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tomcam
I kept rooting for a flood fill algorithm.

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tempodox
Minimalistic software is one thing. But a minimalistic hardware system like
this is quite a feat. Chapeau!

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thekylemontag
Extremely impressive. Going to be wild to see where this area of research goes
in the next 1-3 years.

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BrandonMarc
Wired has a good write-up, too:

[http://www.wired.com/2014/08/largest-robot-swarm-
ever/](http://www.wired.com/2014/08/largest-robot-swarm-ever/)

The quote at the end, about needing a larger table to handle a bigger swarm,
made me think of the movie Jaws: "We're going to need a bigger boat."

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bitwize
If we can get these babies down to nanoscale size, will we have invented
Transformium?

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kornork
I think people who are unimpressed are underestimating the potential power of
this kind of work... this could be the very beginning of a real life holodeck,
where trillians of nanobots self assemble.

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drd0rk
Remember Replicators from Stargate? Be ready.

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fred_durst
_> and maybe even art_

hahahahahaha.... oh scientists....

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ6pehGKdW4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ6pehGKdW4)

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jostmey
I feel like this research garnered attention only because (1) it uses little
robots and (2) it came from Harvard. A computer simulation could have
demonstrated the effectiveness of the underlying algorithm just as well. I
also suspect if this same project had been done at a state school far fewer
people would notice.

~~~
Retric
The underlying algorithm is terrible. It took over 11 hours to get 1,000
robots into a vary rough shape. However, actually building something that
works in hardware is hard, Bulding a better algorithm is far less so.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
It took 11 hours because of locomotion method of the Kilobots - they use
vibration to move. Without at least looking at the paper, and probably
studying it in depth, it would be hard to determine how good the algorithm is.

It is definitely nothing revolutionary, however bot movement is not externally
controlled. They figure out their own relative positioning and where they need
to go. Moreover they do that only based on short range led communications. So
they communicate with small number of other bots at the same time (I think
one, but I am not 100% sure), as opposed to lets say using central router to
communicate all at the same time.

TL:DR Sensors, movement systems, and precision are shit on purpose, so
important part that distributed algorithm actually worked.

~~~
tomp
I'm pretty sure it's externally controlled to some extent. Otherwise, how
would they know what kind of shape to build, and even more importantly, how to
scale it - to do that, you have to know the total number of robots, something
which cannot be discovered locally.

~~~
scott_s
The article answered those questions:

 _First, all the robots are put together in an unformed blob and are given an
image of the desired shape to be built. Four specially programmed seed robots
are then added to the edge of the group, marking the position and orientation
of the shape. These seed robots emit a message that propagates to each robot
in the blob and allows them to know how “far” away from the seed they are and
their relative coordinates. Robots on the edge of the blob then follow the
edge until they reach the desired location in the shape that is growing in
successive layers from the seed.

The algorithm had to account for unreliable robots that are pushed out of
their desired location or block other robots performing their functions.
Nagpal’s team overcame this challenge by implementing strategies that allowed
robots to rely on their neighbours to cooperatively monitor for faults. They
also avoided relying too heavily on exact positioning within the shape
boundaries._

~~~
tomp
Maybe I'm not understanding the quote correctly, but I see no explanation of
how they figure out the correct _scale_ (i.e. the size of a shape - obviously,
with 4096 robots, they could make the shape twice as big).

~~~
scott_s
I was pointing out that it's _not_ externally controlled. If you want a full
understanding of the algorithm, you'll probably need to read the paper. The
supplementary material and the full paper go into this in detail. The
supplementary material is a pdf, which I can email to you if you want to see
it.

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mncolinlee
I believe I've read this story somewhere before.

[http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Decision-Daniel-
Suarez/dp/0451417...](http://www.amazon.com/Kill-Decision-Daniel-
Suarez/dp/0451417704/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386990144&sr=1-1&keywords=kill+decision+suarez)

