Wednesday 24 September 2014

Arrival of the Robot Flash Mob


Robot Flash Mob
Science has leapt up to a point where we get to find things reaching to unexpected turn of events. We found ‘Self-organisation of robots’. Sounds damn scary in the first instance but when you find that these non-fleshy robotic animals are made up and conjugated at a single place, you have got to say that it looks damn cool. Yes, a flash mob of around 1000 robots ought to be very cool in nature. There were swarm robots that were made to work and communicate among themselves but they could be made up to only 100 such robots. This time science has jumped to a greater extent to bring 1000 robots together to be able to arrange themselves in a certain way and perform a task.

Amazing features and concerned things:- 

  • The research was based mostly in Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences first thought of such a massive flash mob and then came up with this feature.
  • This mob is based on the simple basic rule of connecting and gathering more to complete the task just the way the ants do. The basic rule of simple organisms joining parts to make a complex structure. The researchers did value the point and took ideas from the fact that things in biology are so simple and small to look at but still when they connect together, they do the seemingly pretty impossible tasks.
  • This team of robots are called‘Kilobots’, which are very simple in nature. These robots are so simple that they possess only two pairs of stiffed wire as legs and move via vibration with the use of infrared light for communication with the fellow robots. There is no system for assigning cameras to the robots for visualisation.
  • A two dimensional command is sent directly to the robots all at once to perform a task and they start arranging themselves in a specific way to complete the task.
  • Well, the problem of more than 100 robots at once was removed via the additional use of 4 four lieutenants at very crucial areas and the rest of the robots use edge detection to gather and orient themselves giving rise to flash mob kind of appearance.
Things still under consideration:-
  • The robots that are used re simpler than most conventional robots. Therefore, they are less reliable but with greater variability. Although, the scaling and auto- correcting mechanisms of the robots due to perfect designing overcome these problems very often.
  • What happened during the first robot flash mob was that the robots were able to successfully create three shapes- the letter K, a wrench and a starfish. Wrench took 6 hours to complete, on the other hand k and starfish took about 12 hours.
  • What had to be commended was that these robots even took much time to complete this orientation but they were successful in creating this 2-d dimension via themselves without external cues.
This gives light to the fact that eventually we will see a greater number of robots working together to perform a task and do it within lesser times with proper auto- orientation.


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