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Designing Collective Behavior in a Termite-Inspired Robot Construction Team
Type
Complex systems are characterized by many independent components whose low-level actions produce collective high-level results. Predicting high-level results given low-level rules is a key open challenge; the inverse problem, finding low-level rules that give specific outcomes, is in general still less understood. We present a multi-agent construction system inspired by mound-building termites, solving such an inverse problem. A user specifies a desired structure, and the system automatically generates low-level rules for independent climbing robots that guarantee production of that structure. Robots use only local sensing and coordinate their activity via the shared environment. We demonstrate the approach via a physical realization with three autonomous climbing robots limited to onboard sensing. This work advances the aim of engineering complex systems that achieve specific human-designed goals.
Our paper on the Termes robots was one of a handful of robotics papers to have been ever published in Science at the time. It was the Cover Article, the subject of the Perspective Article, and was chosen as one of the top stories that year by both Science and Nature (see Science Top 10 Breakthrough)
Overview of the project and more movies can be found on our youtube channel: Movie (SSR Youtube Channel)
Paper Supplement and Movies can be found here.