How termite-inspired robots could build for us
Human construction projects are generally centrally planned, with people
in leadership roles supervising how everything is put together, and
builders aware of the overall progress.
But termites and other animals go about building in a different way,
working independently. Each termite reacts directly to what it
encounters, rather than having a preconceived notion of what to do.
Collectively, the insects can create a mound much larger than
themselves.
"They do all of their coordination indirectly, by changing their shared environment," says Justin Werfel of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Werfel and colleagues used this model of decentralized, reactive
building to create robots operating under those principles. Robots that
behave this way could be useful for construction projects that would be
too dangerous for humans, such as underwater research stations or in
outer space. Another possible application would be building levees out
of sandbags in flood zones, Werfel said.
"If you had a robot system to handle that kind of building
automatically, that would let you keep people out of harm's way," Werfel
said.
The findings are published in the journal Science and presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting this week.
These robots are small -- 4.7 inches high, with a footprint of about 4 x
7 inches. The "bricks" that they can manipulate, made of expanded
urethane foam, are bigger than these critters: 8.5 x 8.5 x 2 inches.
Researchers created algorithms governing the behavior of the robots, so
that they know what to do when they encounter specific situations. It's
not the blueprint that guides the robots, but rather these predefined
simple rules.
The construction begins with a single "seed" brick in a particular location.
The robots can move forward, backward and turn in place. They were
designed to be able to climb up or down a step that is the height of one
brick and build staircases with the bricks to get themselves higher up.
Importantly, these robots only detect bricks and other robots that are
in their immediate area; they have no idea how far along the overall
structure is or what more distant robots are doing.
"Robots obtain information about where bricks have been attached only through direct inspection," researchers wrote.
The design of the robots in this research wasn't intended to be "cute,"
although they may appear that way -- some researchers call them
"frog-bots" or "squirrel-bots," said Kirsten Peterson, a co-author on
the study. They have rounded features for the sake of simplicity and
using less material.
The robots have four types of sensors, Peterson said. A
pattern-recognition system, composed of seven infrared sensors, can
detect black and white patterns on the bricks and helps with navigation.
In addition to tactile sensing, the robots have a pattern recognition
system, an accelerometer to sense tilt, and five ultrasound sonar units
to detect other robots and help maintain distance from the perimeter of
the structure.
To move around, the robots have wheel-legs called "whegs."
This study did not optimize the robots for speed. It took three robots
half an hour to build a "trident" structure with eight blocks, Peterson
said.
A decentralized system of robots has some advantages over a centrally
planned method of building. If individuals perish, the plan doesn't fall
apart, because it doesn't depend on how many builders there are.
When everything is planned out, you'd have to go back to the drawing
board if some of the robot builders bit the dust. But a decentralized
system readily adapts to the loss of participants, Werfel said, just
like what happens in nature with termites.
"If half the colony gets eaten by an aardvark, the rest can carry on," he said.
There are still some engineering challenges that would need to be solved
to ramp this up to large-scale projects on Earth, the study said, but
Werfel said it's conceivable that designing robot systems such as these
for disaster zones would in the realm of years away, Werfel said.
For more extreme environments such as other planets, scaling these kinds
of robots up to the task might take decades, Werfel said. But
conceivably the principle of this study could be applied to send robots
to build a base on Mars.
If they build it, maybe we will come.
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source: cnn.com
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