Doctoral Thesis Defense: Automating Construction with Artificial Swarms

[chanaleh]

http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=1114

Speaker: Justin Werfel, MIT CSAIL
Date: Friday, April 28 2006
Time: 2:00PM to 3:00PM
Location: 32-D463 (Star)

In this thesis I describe a distributed system for automating construction, in which autonomous mobile robots build user-specified structures from square building blocks. The swarm approach is inspired by social insects, which build large, complex structures through the collective actions of many simple agents acting with no centralized control or preplanning. The artificial system I present shares many desirable features with these natural ones, such as considerable parallelism and robustness to component loss. Further, unlike insect colonies, it can build particular desired structures according to a high-level design.

Robots in this system act without explicit communication or cooperation, instead using the partially completed structure to coordinate their actions. This mechanism is analogous to that of stigmergy used by social insects, in which insects take actions that affect the environment, and the environmental state influences further actions. I introduce a framework of "extended stigmergy" in which building blocks are allowed to store, process or communicate information. Increasing the capabilities of the building material (rather than of the robots) in this way increases the local availability of nonlocal structure information. Benefits include significant improvements in construction speed and in ability to take advantage of the parallelism of the swarm.

I describe system design and control rules for decentralized teams of robots that collectively build arbitrary solid structures in two dimensions. I present a hardware prototype, and discuss extensions to more general structures, including those built with multiple block types and in three dimensions.

Comments

[besamim.livejournal.com]

Oh that sounds so cool, especially if the prototype will actually build something during the defense. Good luck to Justin.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was wondering too if the actual robot would be part of the demonstration. I'm guessing so since he was spending some quality time* with the robot this weekend (it's notoriously temperamental). But I haven't wanted to press him for too many details about it...!

*Not as much quality time as I got, though, I think, so yay. :-)

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Update: The robot building will be on video only. Much like the showbiz adage "Never work with kids or animals," attempting to bring off a live demonstration with a temperamental robot is not considered advisable. >:-)

[miraclaire.livejournal.com]

it sounds really interesting. I'm sorry I have to miss it (a class I could normally skip meets during that time, but we're being given the take-home final on Friday, so I really should be there)

[roozle.livejournal.com]

sounds like inventing literate robots, then giving them blueprints to read.

[moria923.livejournal.com]

Does he have just one robot, or enough to make a swarm? Has he actually had a swarm build something?

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

No, the swarm aspect is only in the simulation. :-) There is just the one prototype robot. It's what they call a "toy system" -- a functioning model just to show how the key features of the idea would work.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Very cool! I'd muse about going, but I don't suppose strangers staring at him would be helpful... ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

i hope it goes well. also --- any word on the digital book thing? tried to email you.
I'm registered for it, would love it if we went together.