Morphogenesis and Swarm Robotics

Here is an amazing video!

Something about this video first from the you-tube information about it.

An introduction to swarm intelligence, swarm robotics and morphogenesis. This video won the Best Video award at the AAAI-07 conference Vancouver Canada. The scientific research was performed by Anders Lyhne Christsensen, Rehan O’Grady and Marco Dorigo. The video was directed by Andreia Onofre.

Swarm Intelligence is an AI technique that is based on the collective behavior of decentralised and self organised systems. Take an ant colony for example, an ant hill is an extremely complex structure, with even things like temperature control in place. It is difficult to imagine a simple ant doing any of it! So it is basically the “swarm” of ants that is responsible for such emergent and intelligent solutions though the “constituents” of the systems (i.e ants) are simple and independent “units”. Like ants also can pick up prey many times their weight by forming very precise structures encircling the object under consideration.

like in the picture below the ants take up a comparatively much heavier fly.

photo credit with full regards : here>>

The video basically explains the same and also gives an idea on how it could be done using robots. For example a bird swarm can make very different and complex shapes depending on the set of rules under use (which in turn will depend on the scenario). I will accompany this statement by a post on a bird swarm and how they do it sometime soon. If you change the set of rules you could change the shape you get, and most of these shapes could be used to perform some intelligent task. This gives the swarm a lot of flexibility. This is basically what is Morphogenesis.

Morphogenesis could be used by a swarm of robots to move heavy objects (as an illustration to this have a look at this video, in which a group of robots pull away a child. The video can be seen here>>) which could be used in fire-fighting applications etc, to bridge gaps etc. A swarm of nano-bots could use morphogenesis to perform very specific tasks inside the human body!

Please have a look at this award winning video!

I personally thank and congratulate the director of this video for putting it all so succinctly in a matter of under 5 minutes.