How Analyzing Robotic Swarm Behavior Can Help Navigate Disaster Areas
This story is straight out of a Sci-Fi movie! Scientists are utilizing large swarms of robots, programmed to operate cooperatively and communally, to study how they interact and move. The goal is to observe the robotic swarm behavior in order to learn how workers can safely navigate disaster areas. What a concept!
What Analyzing Robotic Swarm Behavior Can Tell Us
Scientists at the University of Colorado sought to program the robots in a way that mirrors how bees or ants might operate collectively. The goal was to observe how they cluster together or distribute themselves based on the simulated disaster environment within which they operate. These observations, in theory, can be correlated with environmental features which in turn can provide insights into how rescue workers or emergency personnel can navigate a disaster area safely.
The robots themselves had no ability to communicate. Instead, they were programmed to employ random motion to explore the environment. Interestingly, as the robots interacted with each other during this process, more complicated swarm behaviors began to appear, such as task delegation and something akin to robotic group think. This is known as “emergent swarm behavior.”
While this is a very cool concept, it’s not perfect. The robots that formed the swarm had relatively high failure rates, and they lacked sensors or the ability to communicate, somewhat limiting the insights that can be gleaned. That said, the main goal of the University of Colorado study was to observe robot density to predict environmental features, and despite the limitations, that goal was achieved.
From an emergency preparedness perspective, this is a great concept. Much like running emergency exercises or drills, the robotic swarm experiment involved observing behaviors during a simulated emergency, and utilizing the observations for process improvement purposes. It will be interesting to see how future robotic swarm experiments are improved to maximize the insights. That said, the University of Colorado study is off to a terrific start!
